First I wrote this poem:

Walking up the slate path of the college park
under the nearly full moon the brown oak leaves
are red as maples
and I have been looking at the young people
they speak and embrace one another
because of them I thought I would descend
into remembering love so I
let myself down
hand over hand
until my feet touched the earth of the gardens
of Vesey Street

I told my husband, I’ve just written a poem about love.

What a good idea, he said.

Then he told me about Sally Johnson on Lake Winnipesaukee, who was twelve and a half when he was fourteen. Then he told me about Rosemarie Johanson on Lake Sunapee. Then he told me about Jane Marston in Concord High, and then he told me about Mary Smythe of Radcliffe when he was a poet at Harvard. Then he told me about two famous poets, one fair and one dark, both now dead, when he was a secret poet working at an acceptable trade in an office without windows. When at last he came to my time—that is, the past fifteen years or so—he told me about Dotty Wasserman.

Hold on, I said. What do you mean, Dotty Wasserman? She’s a character in a book. She’s not even a person.

O.K., he said. And why Vesey Street? What’s that?

Well, it’s nothing special. I used to be in love with a guy who was a shrub buyer. Vesey Street was the downtown garden center of the city when the city still had wonderful centers of commerce. I used to walk the kids there when they were little carriage babies half asleep, maybe take the ferry to Hoboken. Years later I’d bike down there Sundays, ride round and round. I even saw him about three times.

No kidding, said my husband. How come I don’t know the guy?

Ugh, the stupidity of the beloved. It’s you, I said. Anyway, what’s this baloney about you and Dotty Wasserman?

Nothing much. She was this crazy kid who hung around the bars. But she didn’t drink. Really it was for the men, you know. Neither did I—drink too much, I mean. I was just hoping to get laid once in a while or maybe meet someone and fall madly in love.

He is that romantic. Sometimes I wonder if loving me in this homey life in middle age with two sets of bedroom slippers, one a skin of sandal for summer and the other pair lined with cozy sheepskin—it must be a disappointing experience for him.

He made a polite bridge over my conjectures. He said, She was also this funny mother in the park, years later, when we were all doing that municipal politics and I was married to Josephine. Dotty and I were both delegates to that famous Kansas City National Meeting of Town Meetings. N.M.T.M. Remember? Some woman.

No, I said, that’s not true. She was made up, just plain invented in the late fifties.

Oh, he said, then it was after that. I must have met her afterward.

He is stubborn, so I dropped the subject and went to get the groceries. Our shrinking family requires more coffee, more eggs, more cheese, less butter, less meat, less orange juice, more grapefruit.

Walking along the street, encountering no neighbor, I hummed a little up-and-down tune and continued jostling time with the help of my nice reconnoitring brain. Here I was, experiencing the old earth of Vesey Street, breathing in and out with more attention to the process than is usual in the late morning—all because of love, probably. How interesting the way it glides to solid invented figures from true remembered wraiths. By God! I thought. The lover is real. The heart of the lover continues; it has been propagandized from birth.

I passed our local bookstore, which was doing well, with “The Joy of All Sex” underpinning its prosperity. The owner gave me, a dependable customer of poorly advertised books, an affectionate smile. He was a great success. (He didn’t know that three years later his rent would be tripled, he would become a sad failure, and the landlord, feeling himself brilliant, an outwitting entrepreneur, a star in the microeconomic heavens, would be the famous success.)

From half a block away I could see the kale in the grocer’s bin, crumbles of ice shining the dark leaves. In interior counterview I imagined my husband’s northern country fields, the late autumn frost in the curly green. I began to mumble a new poem:

In the grocer’s bin, the green kale shines
in the north country it stands sweet with frost
dark and curly in a garden of tan hay
and light white snow. . . .

Light white . . . I said that a couple of questioning times. Suddenly my outside eyes saw a fine-looking woman named Margaret, who hadn’t spoken to me in two years. We’d had many years of political agreement before some matters relating to the Soviet Union separated us. In the angry months during which we were both right in many ways, she took away with her to her political position and daily friendship my own best friend, Louise—my lifelong park, P.-T.A., and anti-war-movement sister, Louise.

In a hazy litter of love and leafy green vegetables I saw Margaret’s good face, and before I remembered our serious difference, I smiled. At the same moment, she knew me and smiled. So foolish is the true love when responded to that I took her hand as we passed, bent to it, pressed it to my cheek, and touched it with my lips.

I described all this to my husband at suppertime. He was happy to explain everything. The smile was for Margaret, he said, but you know you miss Louise a lot and the kiss was for Louise. We both said, Ah! Then we talked over the way the SALT treaty looked more like a floor than a ceiling, read a poem written by one of his daughters, looked at a TV show telling the destruction of the European textile industry, and made love.

In the morning he said, You’re some lover, you know. He said, You really are—you remind me a lot of Dotty Wasserman. ♦