That was the one that got me in trouble.

I’VE BEEN IN Saskatoon for quite a while. It’s not so bad. Love announces itself everywhere, it matters just as much to the dry cleaner and the motel receptionist as it does to poets and dancers.

Since then, my poet has gotten some recognition. He started setting his poetry to music, and by now he has actual fans. He no longer reads in bars and suburban libraries. It seems his first hit (“hit” being a relative term for him) was a song about the woman in Montreal.

I have no idea what’s happened to her.

I see that I was right to end the affair before it started. I feel sure the poem and the song wouldn’t have been written if he’d put his hand over hers on that long-ago afternoon and she’d answered with a kiss, if they’d had time to reach the irritations and disappointments — the finger taps on the tabletop, the laundry piles, the uneasy silences — that are inevitable in our lives but may not be all that helpful where certain love poems are concerned.

I told him to choose the poem about the woman over the woman herself. I don’t regret it. It did get me transferred to Saskatoon, though.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Saskatoon. People call it the Paris of the Prairies, I’m not making that up.

Poems and songs survive. That’s part of why we care about them. Which is why I have no second thoughts, hardly any, about turning the poet away from the woman while she was still a poem to him.

I do wonder, sometimes, what happened to her. I’m sure she met somebody else. And after all, she was made into a song, a song playing right now, somewhere in the world.