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Oleanders
Your hands were soft
like the stuffing of the inside of a pillow,
but your fingernails could claw
through the thickest skins.
You used to wake up at sunrise
to paint pictures of the vacant highways,
the sky in swirls of orange and purple,
lonely passers-by
on their way to work in the cold frost
of the morning.
I would stay up
at all hours of the night writing lists,
taking walks in the garden, and
putting on that ice-blue diamond
necklace (that you gave me last July
on our second anniversary)
I used to count the freckles
on your skin the way I counted
the stars in the night sky
whenever you stayed out late.
You used to trace the outline of my
hip-bones in our solemn garden
beneath the buttermilk sky
in the middle of the afternoon.
Someone said
that you live in the city now,
and that you still paint highways
and lonely passers-by from the
inside of a coffeehouse on 7th,
and when the sky
is tinted orange or purple
I’ll cross your mind.
And sometimes I’ll wear
that ice-blue diamond necklace,
from two years back,
around my neck,
on lonely days filled with rain
and vanilla-scented candles.
And in the Spring,
the oleanders bloomed in our garden
and I wondered if someone else
had stolen your heart.
