You write that you will have dinner with Ellen,
the new math teacher.
I’ll never know her,
or, the other of your recent friends—
your new life spilling
a bright white wash over the old.
 
And, where you are, the night hushed
in jasmine, you loosely knot
a fringed shawl around your waist,
and saunter to dinner.
 
Here, in places dipped in northern lights,
the heat is on in every room,
and yesterday, I took a long skid
on a straightaway with an approaching curve.
 
That giddy moment of morning and ice,
my car, veering toward a stone wall,
ushered all memory to this:
 
a room covered with Navajo rugs
belonging to neither of us,
just a place we were sleeping in.
 
At night you woke to ghost weavers
fusing patterns of grey hills and wide ruins
under coyote moons, designs we find
ourselves in, momentarily. 
 
Tonight, you will have dinner with Ellen.
Here the roads will thaw down to blacktop. 
Never knowing what spinning head on toward walls,
or secrets shared over plates of linguini will bring.
 
Those wide ruins, grey hills, coyote moons—
 
Patterns knotted in love and loss.