The sound of your shoes dropping,
thwack!
and another thwack!
tells me our careful trestle has collapsed,
our lunchtime détente, over.
Never mind, this is the reason for a bag of books,
why I dump out Heaney, Hemingway, Joyce, Gluck,
and read madly under the monkeypod tree.
And still your silence stays with me;
only thing to do is swim to the pier,
return to find a plover pecking
at the flyleaf picture of
James Joyce.
We will learn to tolerate.
Become happy.
Eventually, news of each other’s deaths
will not trouble us.
But just now
you were watching from our hotel window,
I saw your muscled back
retreating.
Trish Saunders has poems published or forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, Gargoyle Magazine, Chiron Review, and Open Arts Forum, among other places. She lives in Seattle.
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