When I am just a memory
and you are but a thought,
let us inhabit the same mind.
The book written about you
will take up space on the same
shelf as the one about me.
My street will intersect yours.
Your river will narrow
to a stream in my park,
my airline will schedule
flights to several gates
at your airport. Your name
will be popular among parents
of girl babies and mine with boys,
we will meet and marry many
times again for centuries. When
creatures come from another
star, it’ll be romances about us
they’ll take back as samples
of human literature. When
the sun blinks out, we’ll live on
under other strange light.
Gary Charles Wilkens is the author of The Red Light Was My Mind, which won the 2006 Texas Review Breakthrough Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Texas Review, Moon City Review, Passages North, The Adirondack Review, James Dickey Review, and Melancholy Hyperbole. He is an associate professor of English at Norfolk State University.