good bye

The repairman in the doorway,
yellow hard-hat, scrub-jacket: Goodbye.
Name flashed on a plastic card.

He slips back into his life with
a fence around it.

Draped windows.

Not mine.

Lately I am so hard
people slide off me forever.

This emptiness sharpens me.
Light prints itself on the plate of memory,
acid on metal.

It's three years since we invented, you and I,
a ritual for leaving.

Back to back in the city street at noon

we walked five paces apart, and were swallowed up
by our lives.

When they said, If you eat this fruit you will die,

they didn't mean right away.