[How will I leave this life, like I left my job, drifting off without]

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How will I leave this life, like I left my job, drifting off without

comment, like mother took off to get schooled, shut the door

hard on my crying, she had books to read, or father in an ambulance,

rotating light swept red over oak trees, then the hospital bed,

hallucinating war ship and sea, or the way my ex left us, dragging

his clothes in a garbage bag through snow like fresh kill, or like I left

K, I had twenty minutes before he’d get home to try to change my mind

or kill me, out the red door with my dad’s briefcase full of all my poems

and the typewriter and seal skin coat, and then the airplane home,

so freaked by the years with him in New York I broke when I stirred

up a grouse in the woods, will I leave like a grouse leaves, drumming

the air with its wings, or like Freddie left the stage when Queen played

Live Aid, glossed like a racehorse, top of his game, or like I leave parties,

no valedictions, out the door like smoke from extinguished candelabras