Rooms

She claimed she didn't remember me

  how I helped her get here to escape gambling debts

  or how, to heal my heartbreak, she taught me to dance.

  That night, after she drank too much,

  I brought her safely to her hotel room.

  The next day I returned there and asked for her.

  The clerk said there was no Lulu in that room.

  There had been a Mimi in that room but she had left.

  Later, I learned that a jealous boyfriend killed her there.

  But I prefer to imagine her transforming into a white crane

  that flew away to live in a perfect upper world.

   I asked for that room.  The manager said it needed to be redecorated.

  Intending to occupy it when ready, I moved into a neighboring room.

  There, through the thin walls between the rooms, I listened 

  to the manager's elder daughter in Lulu's emptied room

  as she obsessively rehearsed conversations with an absent lover

  her heels clicking on the wood as she turned in small circles

  repeating herself as troubled people in love sometimes do.

  To me, as she paces she is a leopard gradually shedding its spots

  finally becoming wholly white and solely good.