Rust Ears

A stranger's dog at the café, rust-eared,

chin on its paw the way you used to do —

the gesture so exact that something cleared

inside me, or collapsed. I'm not sure which is true.

I set the cup down. Couldn't drink. The cream

had cooled into a film across the top.

Eleven years and you arrive mid-dream

of nothing — just a Tuesday, just a stop

for coffee, just a dog that isn't mine

who sleeps the way you slept beside my bed

at nineteen, when I thought that grief was fine,

was something that could wait. The sun instead

caught those ears, the rust of them, the way

light finds the thing you didn't know you'd kept.

The stranger gathered up the leash. Walked away.

I sat there with a coffee getting cold.

I wept is too clean a word. I just

couldn't move for a while.