I finished the wine. The next time I saw him, he was reading a cigarette ad.

            I was then unable to throw his clothes out the window.

 

He counted the summers, the jobs, who he answered and used.

            I had a child’s realism. Sometimes, I became anything,

 

a butcher, a moral exercise. And he called it research.

            I went upstairs, to our one-bedroom apartment, and

 

simply cried. He was interested in the silence

            of my narrator. Which was only a river.

 

I took him to that party. He never asked, he didn’t need to.

            A year passed before I stopped hearing his voice,

 

and then noticed the waiters in blue, the street

            outside my sunlit window, that great resistance -

 

the beginning of a special ache.