New Poem

Tbilisi

9 Months

When you walked through the door with soda bottles
sealed in wax, filled with homemade wine,
I wanted to tell you everything.
I wanted the coincidence of your good news
to say something good about myself.
But it was morning. We drank instead to health.
While you slept off the red-eye hangover
on our yellow couch overlooking another city
I baked cookies and stocked the fridge with apples.
I pinned your shirts to the living-room clothesline,
eager for the powdery scent of your deodorant
to overwhelm, again, our little room
like the first syllable of a city you’d loved all year
in letters I found last week in our storage locker.
How did we leave things? These things,
I mean, that should never belong to one of us?
Tell me I’m getting this wrong. Or right. Tell me
it is a kind of blessing still to speak the name of your city.