Address to the Ex

Have you quieted yet?

Are you calm?

Or are you standing under a ginkgo

on University, attempting to appear normal, your left eye

opening like China in the first years of the Tang dynasty,

and your right denying everything?

The streets are depopulated of you.

Missing on Twelfth, Mercer and Greene,

unaccounted for on Bethune, AWOL from Leroy,

only a memory on Christopher, vanished from Eighth.

Were you marched away raging mute in tears,

unpacifiable fuming, making sarcastic remarks,

contemptuous yet aloof, begging for mercy in your mind,

scared, internally frail, and divided against yourself?

Did you holler pitifully back to all you lost?

Are you wasting away somewhere

pale with self doubt, fragile, and near collapse like

a cheap mobile home, exuviated, bereft?

Released without comment, have you wandered by my house,

an unfashionable amnesiac asking directions?

Is there, even now, some address, some meeting place,

a woody facade long since transformed by commerce, or a

chair

at the airport you return to still hoping I'll show?

If I gather myself, begin anew, if I take that real estate course,

will I discover to my horror I have missed you by seconds?

Was that you sitting on the steps of the crematorium

eating a sundae? Last night, as the heavens

wept openly and the thunder

spoke of its problems, was that you humming

along the sills, making with your fingers

that squeaking noise that used to drive me nuts?

If I leave tonight is it possible I might overtake you

east of the mountains?

Will I come on you, enraged with your hood up

as some mechanic insults your intelligence

for the last time, someone who should have known better?

Are you out there, just beyond me,

an inch farther into the dark than I can see?