My wife’s upstairs,
hard at work.
I don’t understand
what she thinks about
in that tiny room
looking out at the apple trees,
an ordinary field, a thread of stream.
She’s thinking of something else.
It’s a dreary day, though the foliage
makes its first appearance
on the locust trees, bales of hay
stacked neatly by the farmer’s barn.
She’s thinking of something else.
Surrounded by books, strands of hair
I imagine in her eyes, a gaze
she offers the window, a distance all her own.
Those books are long journeys,
trainrides through the Urals,
parlors in which lovers meet
but can’t openly speak. In the next room,
parents, the police, a nosy concierge.
Several kinds of intrigue.
She’s so quiet as to be invisible.
I put my ear to the door,
every sense alert. So close
I can almost feel her pulse and breath.
But wife’s far away in that room,
my out of the ordinary, fills that space
with longing, the aroma of fallen apples,
the space a single room can’t hold.
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