Splitting Up

The vases and tables, glasses and silverware
weren’t the hard things to give up.
Just that they left holes like the dog
had uprooted the backyard geraniums.
It was dividing the memories that cursed us.
The dinners at the patio table,
the porcelain bowl I bought her as a birthday
gift in Washington, D.C., sangria in the
late afternoon sun on the Adirondack chairs,
the dark afternoon in bed after our friend’s suicide.
The porch light burning yellow and the glow of windows
covered us like a curtain; the neighbors never guessed.
I loaded her bike in the moving truck,
a potted rose from an anniversary.
Before I watched her drive away
like she was taking the dead to their grave,
we held each other in the house among
empty spaces and boxes, an autumn evening
closing on us like our own eyes.