Spring Garden Street

I had left her sitting on the front stoop
and crossed the street

to light my cigarette—April
in the early evening,

the pear trees with their arms full
of white blossoms, comfortless as ghosts.

She’d put her head down as she spoke on the phone
for only a moment, but in that moment

I had stepped to my right, leaving her line
of vision, becoming slowly aware—

and it surprised me—that I was growing frightened
thinking how

if she looked to find me
where I’d stood just a second before,

she would find nothing
but her own reflection

shown back to her
in the window of a car:

alone on the front steps,
the month before we separated,

though we didn’t know that then.
Her dark hair blowing in the cold.