The art of leaving

In the next room, they talk like rain,
my friend and her boyfriend, who lie in till noon.
I don’t begrudge them; the house is so cold.
The skies outside are heavy and white.
We only get up for the tea kettle scream
Or a knock on the door.

Leaves blow in when I open the door,
Like creatures taking refuge from the spattering rain.
The sky darkens with a scream
Just past noon.
She runs out into the rush of white
And is shocked by the cold.

The next week, she came down with a cold.
We stuffed all our blankets under the doors
and I lost myself in flocks of white
Pages and thought of watching the rain
Overflow the potted plants that afternoon
And her laughter, the surprised scream.

Up at dark with the owl's scream
To pick up my tea, now cold,
I drift into the eclipsed noon.
I don’t remember opening the door
But I do remember listening for the footsteps of rain
And watching a shadow pass over the white

Of your eye – more white 

Than the moonlit clouds that drowned out the sky’s hoarse scream,
Like a banshee who feels on her skin the burning rain
And knows that the art of leaving is a cold,
Black art, sometimes marked on one’s door,
Where it dries the next day in the heat of noon.

In the blank stare of the afternoon.
I sit looking out at the off-white
gate beyond our door.
The quiet of my brain suppresses the screams
down the street, where kids fill their lungs with cold
fresh air, impervious to the light, steady rain.

I fear that time in the afternoon when my brain will unearth that internal scream
that was bleached white and has turned cold,
waiting in the rain outside of our door.