fallen verses

Picnic, Lightning
after Nabokov and Collins

I reflect upon our relationship
with a vast sense of incredulity,
because it was not fate,
but innumerable elements of social circumstance.
I had artificially white hair;
you had a black, beaded choker.
We met like elementary particles:
spin and anti-spin,
and inevitably consumed each other
and consigned ourselves to oblivion.

Someday, a physicist will be able to explain
why our annihilation was so protracted,
instead of the expected instantaneity,
and just what happened to the
strange and individual particles
careening, at the end,
off into space.