I waited for him to make sense

I waited for him to make sense.

but he was slurring raspy nothings

into my hair so I excused myself

and retreated to the bathroom

where I confessed my transgressions

to the woman in the mirror

allowing the clock’s hands

their steady stumble around the bend

of the hour and when I eventually

returned to the living room

he was passed out on the sofa

so I laid a blanket over him

withdrew to my bedroom

and locked the door.

 I waited for you at the inn

I waited for you at the inn by the Hooge Crater

while you toured military cemeteries with the other historians

and I stayed back in the greenness of the courtyard

to write poems about the mud and trenches and death.

The inn owner’s son served me my Salad Niçoise and told me

I didn’t seem American, and I put down my pen and asked why.

As he sat himself at my table and lit a cigarette, he told me

because I ate vegetables and was not loud. I asked him

how old he was when he started smoking. He exhaled long

and slow, avoiding my gaze, before he stood up and left me

to eat alone, among the flowers and trees and the now

smoke-free air, where I wondered if that’s how Belgian men flirt

and whether he thought I should have been flattered by his attention,

which is the problem with some men but especially that one.

I waited to see what you would bring me

I waited to see what you would bring me

this time, always little trinkets picked up

on your way home from school: the chestnut shell

with a larva inside you wanted as a pet,

the “baby rocks” painted gold and scattered

beneath the playground seesaw like milk teeth,

the box of earrings you saw a guy

putting out on the street. You said he told you

his girlfriend left them behind when she moved out.

He told you to take them all, and you

brought them home to me—

simultaneously a sign of love and of love lost.

Her loss my gain. I wear them still

and think of you.

Bernadette Geyer is the author of the poetry collections What Haunts Me and The Scabbard of Her Throat. She served as editor of My Cruel Invention: A Contemporary Poetry Anthology, published by Meerkat Press. Her writings have appeared in Bennington Review, Barrow Street, Salamander, Poetry Ireland Review, Westerly, and elsewhere.