Honeymoon – by Ella Jeffery

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In Vienna we chose to favour Beethoven  

and despise Mozart, prefer St. Anne’s over  

the Minorite Church, to love the daffodil 

and not the amaryllis, gutedel and not riesling,  

developing a catalogue based on the idiot  

clarity of the single taste, two of us cleaving  

the sanitary, navigable cities, the charitable  

early dark of their winters. We tried  

to have everything, to say this was not only  

possible but allowed, and fielded no regrets,  

admitted no guilt, arrived at each station  

ready for the easy compartments of sleep.  

Each day we woke and chose the distance  

of ignorance until we stood in rain outside  

the Rijksmuseum: closed. I had made us late.  

You turned your face and did not speak. 

You would not give this a place in our list,  

withheld it from our memory’s consensus.  

You should have shared it, made it disappear  

as was possible because it was so slight. How  

can I be expected to forgive such things,  

kept separate as if exempt from our contract?  

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Image: Alex Kalinin - Pexels

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