Distancing

by Amy Soricelli

I count on my red worry beads how many ways you can leave me.
How many flights in the sky with your globe eyes up and down through
the small airplane window.
I count the stones on those Italian streets - the rugged, lonely strips of life
poking through the spaces -
if they are pulled and tightened deep into a memory book -
would that not keep you here?
I see the mountains in some picture you took - sent with four single stamps across
the lines of a place once filled so completely by your presence.
The shallow puffs of your breath.  Your heartbeat like a clock.
Along your wall the photographs - a park with steep steps of rock
another with random locals waving along some train tracks hopeful hands
bouncing up like stones.
I can count the times you've waved goodbye in hurried steps in backwards waves;
I have set my hand in the air long after you've turned.
I can count the ways that love leaves footprints.
The tracks in the snow- the breadcrumb lies.
See its traces run through my fingers like water...
see them wave goodbye.