Fortune

The Metropolitan Museum, our final time together,
The Raphael exhibit, one ‘must’ of musts for me.
Then dinner, you like Chinese, as a Korean, I’m fine.
Your favorite, a hole in the wall, where we could talk.

My parents called a dive like this a ‘greasy spoon,’
Dingy, with flickering lights, where you have to polish
Plates and utensils, needing more napkins than these Chinese
Normally allot a customer — the empty tea cups full of leaves.

The food, for you, is delicious, for me, I think not but don’t say.
Greasy, like the ‘spoon’ I mentioned, but not aloud.
Too much negativity won’t feed a budding friendship,
Which is what we have, I hope, on the way to flowering.

Fortune cookies to close, the classic finish, I ask yours:
‘In the next year you will take a long journey’ — Hawai`i?
I wonder — then mine: ‘Within a year you will be happy’ —
I wonder — it is a long way away from Manhattan.

I say a fond ‘aloha’ as we go our opposite ways for subway stations,
You uptown, me down, a long way away, headed north and south.