The sound of your shoes dropping, ​
thwack!​
and another thwack!
tells me our careful trestle has collapsed,
lunchtime détente, over.
Never mind, this is the reason for a bag of books,
why I dump out Heaney, Hemingway, Joyce, Oates, Vuong
and read madly under the monkeypod tree.
Still, the ache of your silence stays with me,
only thing to do—swim to the pier,
return to find a plover pecking
at the flyleaf picture of
James Joyce.
We will learn to tolerate.
Become happy.
Eventually, news of each other’s deaths
will not trouble us.
But just now
you were watching from a fourth floor window; I saw your muscled back
retreating.
