A friend slips from her marriage
like a dirty shirt, leaving it lie
where it's fallen—across
his grandmother's oak chair, or
on the bathroom floor—a tangle
of buttons and wrinkles not to be
undone. Worn
thin at the elbows,
smelling faintly of Tabu and
sandalwood (the night in Mexico
they went to the ballet folklorico
and held each other in the taxi
back to the hotel, coupled a final
time against the unfamilar dark).
The spaniel puppy, tired out from
searching up and down the stairs
for her, gives up and hollows out
a bed on the limp, tumbled shirt,
an empty sleeve beneath his head.
—Christie (1982)
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