Orphans
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In Tallinn, in a small town in Pennsylvania,
in Matsue—the lives I cast off like clothes
lie in heaps beside the still warm beds.
I went on somewhere else, here, but the life
I left the way I put down a glass, entering

another room, meaning to come back for it,
still anticipates my hand or body. Maybe
in one of those places a man looks up from
his reading expecting me to enter, or a woman
rounding a corner pauses beside old stones

for a second, thinking it’s me crossing the square.
And maybe only the streets wait, only the trees
arching above them. Some mornings, groggy
from sleep, uncertain which life is mine, I turn
as bigamists must, wondering just whose embrace

I will enter. My son has bashed the car door,
my wife glowers. Is one of those lives left
standing open, uncompleted, waving desperately,
discontinued branches, junctions and occasions,
orphaned possibilities only I am missing from?