a poem. i suck at titles.
You left your eyeglasses with me
One cold November first,
The pair of wiry arms
Open and inviting an embrace
As they sat atop my coffee table
Crested with dust.
You walked outside, lacking,
And paused a step to study
The softening flesh of a grinning jack-o-lantern,
Awake and alive just the previous night.
“Your pumpkins are rotting,” you said,
and walked away-by no mistake or
minor lapse in memory-with empty eyes,
angular and small from years of suffocation.
I said nothing (though I felt I should),
for fear I would speak carelessly and
win the last word, your quiet back defeated
only so to speak. Had I seen on my way inside
the delicate set of lenses (unbeknownst to me)
deliberately abandoned, I would have returned
to the door and spoken.
Years later you will tell me that you
Wanted to leave them in time, that
all you ever wanted was to lose and know
the lost would not return. Into the phone I nodded,
a dishonest gesture as futile as my call, and
asked, quite stupidly, “But how did you see then?”
I guessed you found another pair, as nothing
With value is so replaceable, but all you said was
“Clearly,” and I swallowed the back of my throat
into the receiver.