Learning

1.
She went to a blog,
read a poem
he'd written

about a girl
he saw, whom he'd thought to
jump over the bar top for.

(She read this
a hundred years
after her departure,
a thousand years
before her return.)

Yet she sank into herself,
warm with the glory of his words,
chilled by the distance

of his world
and hers.
The growing
parting seas
between them.
A single ship that
never made its return.

2.
Today, she is separating laundry.
Today, she notices the burn scars
on the ironing board.
Today, she accepts the irony
of casual casualties between lovers.

Yesterday, she threw the whites
in with the colors.

3.
She will trace his body as memory with her
chalk-white fingertips
against the blue-grey asphalt
trying to recall

the difference between
murder
and
suicide.