Condolences
In the kitchen,
your ex-wife waits
for the next phone call.
The walls are still yellow.
You never repainted them,
though you said you would,
many years ago,
when you crossed the lake
to bring your three children here.
Migration masked as salvage.
And then another child;
the puppies and kittens;
parakeets, some hamsters and fish;
much later, a rabbit – charms
on a bracelet for the lauded man.
She waits for the next call.
And she will bear it,
because she looked at you once
and saw your gorgeous wound
that shone like a diamond.
She is not your wife anymore,
but everyone will call her today.
Except for those who never do,
which will be worse.
Sometime
in the middle of the night,
she will stand up
and leave the kitchen table
where the full ashtray
will remain for days.
She will walk through the living room,
past the grand piano
you bought for her; the piano
which remains a mausoleum
of her childhood heart.
She will walk by the boxes
sitting below the piano’s underbelly.
The boxes full of ashes
of the cats and the dogs;
the boxes, which will stay there
unopened, until she dies.
She will get into the bed,
slipping, for once,
into the other side,
which has not smelled
like you for a very long time.
Every day after this,
she will sense your death.
Not as an absence, but as a pulsation,
of whatever it was
she thought this life was made of;
of whatever it was
that made her want to love at all.
Every day she will sense you
moving through her body
like the vibration of a marimba strike
felt by a bare foot on the floor.