Here’s the fourth-floor walkup you called home. Here’s the tiny room overlooking Joy Street where Laurel used to roll her waitressing change into paper tubes for the rent. Here’s your room, with the big saggy bed left by a previous tenant. Here’s the bathroom where you didn’t pee at night because darkness was the domain of the cockroaches. Here’s the plant in the sunny window that you wound around itself because it was out of control. Here’s the curbside rocking chair that your friend lugged up for you. Here’s the curbside rug on the living room floor where you used to host your Chinese dinner parties. Here are the stairs he came running back up the last time you saw him. Here’s the couch you were lying on that spring Thursday when the phone call came. This is the place where your life broke. The place you fled a few weeks later. The place where you were a girl and then not. The place that comes back to you in dreams, just the way this poem does.

Encounter
    – Czeslaw Milosz

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.