9th Street

Please understand that sometimes I want to be sad,
walking somewhere by myself, not on the phone,
just alone with my melancholy and the clip-clip
of my boots on a dark empty sidewalk, listening
for strangers sneaking up behind me, eavesdropping
on other strangers' conversation. Then
the street gives way to blank faces of warehouses
with unmarked doors and empty lots, home
to scavenged carcasses of bikes and pinkish
gray baby bassinets, two bathtubs filled with the bottom
halves of old white mannequins, sensual and spooky.
I stop when I reach the old canal,  its gasoline patina gleaming,
littered with jetsam confetti. Above the gusts of wind
and hum of cars on the expressway overhead the clear
pitch of an oboe danced through the dark air.
I looked for the musician. Alone, I had no way to prove
what I was hearing, notes from nowhere.

U-Haul

I cannot make a perfect bite of food and not think of your lips,
pursed and then released, the thing you do when you are looking
for the words to say something. There’s nothing left of yours
to tell me not two weeks ago you sat here too, with me, laughing
like we weren’t about to say the things we did. When I left to go
to work that morning in the dark before the sun came up I put
your shirt and underwear in one neat stack where you would see it.
When I came home they were gone. On the couch I found
my dead friend’s sweatpants in a grocery bag. Through the green plastic
I could see the pattern, a logo that said Life Is Good and a skier, repeating.
My roommate had unearthed them while packing her belongings
into boxes. She’d been meant to pass them on, from a friend
to a friend. Instead, they’d hung on her door for the year that
has passed, which time has filled with air and tied like a balloon.
In the morning she'll take a U-Haul to her new apartment,
her room an empty box, her things all somewhere far from here.
My things are all here with me, and yours are there, with you.