they were aluminum steps, just three, the kind that dig into the backs of your knees
that odd yellow morning you left me.
there was a certain sound each footstep made on those pointy metal planes
and i sat on them a long time after you were gone,
anti-slip peaks digging through the thin cotton of my shorts and brown grass
between my bare toes
cold and dying.
just sitting there with the door wide open behind me
a queer thunderstorm morning, thirsty daisies all dayglo
the gravel spat out by your car's tires little cairns all in a row, seeds unsown
no one else was home, i was all alone
the whole neighbourhood sparse, a stray with a hungry rib cage
stopped to lick my hand
but didn't stay.
there was that long line of hemlock trees a few yards off, denoting borders between
this park and that park,
the wrong side of the conifers was where you loved me most
all that long dry summer, then again all that long dark winter
inside my tin can, inside my white trash bungalow, my hideaway, my drafty lair
our backs on a thin foam mattress
fingering a frayed blanket.
it would sometimes seem to me the hemlocks' boughs spoke to and caressed each other
soft summer wind or roiling winter storm
looking out the porthole from the far side of my bed
i'd wonder at their secret languages and loved them offhandedly
a bit like the way you loved me, as if i were a common but natural wonder
appreciated in small gusts fueled by
mortality, or liquor.
that morning the hemlocks were moving, or seemed to move, though there was no breeze
and though i was distracted at first,
with the heartache of loss and all, the sound of your last words
reverbing in my ear canals like some kind of maritime dirge
i came to be aware of the unfamilliar fluttering as something not tree-like
something decidedly birdlike
filling every bough.
in silence they sat, narrow and fat, covering every itchy inch of branch
feathers ruffled here and there
but otherwise still as the air, and watched me carefully from the hemlock trees
as if they'd always been there and always would be, all black eyes
shiny beaks, the looming threat, a rookery
bearing silent witness
to the aftermath of your retreat.
