After You Left

When you were here: imagery, metaphor,

metonymy. After you left, life was life, as it

should be. After you left, I turned to the velvet

comfort offered by things. In all my wine glasses,

half-empty, I saw chandeliers of tubelights. Not

chataeux but spartan apartments with a few books.

The walls of my mornings peeled off, giving me a gift

I knew I had paid for. My memory made you a conscientious

thief, stealing everything but glances. The cables of our elevator

snapped, and we had never bothered with staircases. Our inside

edges should have raced to long leg, but we had played on, no, along.

On some nights, the void became a celebration, the silence a triumphal cry.

Other nights, yearning in my belly, a touch that would set off an unscientific

electricity. I put away your maps, useless in uncharted territory. Had the scaffolding

not collapsed, I would never have known of the frescoes on the floor. After you left, the trawlers

in the middle of our seas continued to bob about. But there is no temple-calm on our shores.

For us, no existence on sand, on the land.