The Woman Watching a Storm

You were the woman watching a storm while Tom Waits courted you through the better part of a bottle of wine.  If you smoked, you would have done that too, but the last cigarette was over a year ago, and the one before that was with a brief and distant lover, a pattern you were comfortable maintaining.

Sitting in the hurricane dusk, unsure if you loved or endured these moments, you looked South out the Broadway windows at men with their futile umbrellas.  Leaning into the wind like you do your solitude --the silence of the ceiling fan, tires on rain, the leak behind the bedroom wall, you wished for an eventual destination.