Prose

You would have known the signs of a harsher winter, and smelt it in the drier air. You would have sensed legacy in the ordinary. You would have known when the soil was ready for spring, and its brambles and bloodroot and later, the azaleas.
 
I have to return Gerard his favorite book. It’s by Richard Rorty: Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself. It’s from the library, lots of upfront ownership, clarity, and talk of persuasive speech and pragmatism. All aching, and unsurprisingly, riddled with wit and irony. But very little poetry within because of the discourse, a banter really. Where’s the anapestic trimeter, the circling iambs like a rosary, its tinted circle? I want to count the sounds, and hear them trip over each other like ripples in a pool.  
 
Gerard wanted me to delete my eleventh line: “The love that says it like it is, a blue moon after sunset.” He didn’t like the bluing movement in it. It sounds like an afterthought, he said matter-of-factly.
 
I think I’ll leave the dining table and futon. And the clothesline of rugs, the barely used dinnerware. No one’s taking my big chair though, or the egg-and-muffin toaster. Those, and my giant Smurf, are coming with me to Queens.
 
I should have known. I should have seen the signs on the pallid faces, of the missing doorman, his freshly polished shoes tucked behind the row of mailboxes, at a right angle to the wall.

* This piece was first anthologized in  the book, "Writings from the Heart: Stories and Poems from Around the World".