The single wooden bead

This is the saddest one,

this piece of a piece of jewelry that he brought me from India.

I went to the airport where his ex-wife met him, and he said he didn’t want me to be there but I went anyway.

This piece of a piece of jewelry, a wood bead, plain and clunky without the waiting for him that came before.

The four months when I created our homecoming,

him glad that I waited, happy to come home to my bed and that pink stucco house on Stuart Street.

This saddest plain and clunky wood bead piece of jewelry

and him telling me he was

sleeping across the country with a woman who wanted to start a fish farm.

And him calling from a house he borrowed in Noe Valley saying he was feeling close again to me that night,

Come and I will give you these beads from India.

Photograph by Doug Greenberg © 2005