What I came to like best in that apartment 
was the view through the bedroom windows. 
They looked west, and forever, 
the evening star cresting in the early evening. 

The June moon blackened by the heat; 
children tramping through the city’s fountains
like giants in a stream—
it was so hot those months
I retreated in the daytime to the cool dark 
kitchen, where I ate cherries from a cold blue bowl, 
or smoked slowly by the open window 
from the crumpled pack he’d left behind. 

Slow humid afternoons unfolding into evening. The quiet of time. 
All that summer, fireworks rose like flares
in the dusk. I sat at the window thinking 
how lonely they seemed, like signals sent by people
lost at sea.

Long after dinner, I’d close my book and enter my bedroom. 
The heat and the dust had gathered all day,
so stepping into that room 
was like entering a second, hotter summer, he had said, 

the way those months I hid a second life 
inside my other, and insisted after
that nothing happened,
only that it had rained, 
and that he and I had stood together at the bedroom window,
watching it fall. 

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