Ungrateful returns. The wind batters
the gingko, a cardboard box sails by

six stories up. Absence grows familiar,
still, unpalatable. There’s a different

sort of beauty in these
geometric nights, so abstract,

divorced from messy life. A light
goes on, a light goes off. You wrote

from London, it’s nearly dawn there, now.
Or then. I still wake and wonder where

I am. This sky is toothless gray,
no stars for all the light

but still too dark to see,
and everywhere, and everyone, to be.