10 Poems About Someone Moving Away in Different Moods and Forms

You left the blue suitcase
under the stairs,
empty except for dust
and one brass button.
I carried it upstairs
because the house had begun
to look for you.

You took the lamp,
the chipped bowl,
the nail that held your calendar.
The landlord finds the room
larger by three inches,
though nothing has moved
but you.

Your locker is open.
Inside: a ruler,
two orange wrappers,
a timetable for a school
you will not attend.
At three o'clock,
I still turn toward it.

The removal van arrived before breakfast,
its engine making the windows tremble.
You wrapped the plates in yesterday's newspaper
and found a photograph beneath the cutlery drawer:
us at twenty, both of us looking beyond the frame.
By noon, the rooms had lost their arguments.
No coat on the banister.
No shoes beside the back door.
The clock above the sink continued
with its small mechanical objection.
I drove behind you as far as the ring road,
then stopped where the lanes divided.
Your car became a dark mark among delivery vans.
At home, I washed one glass
and set it upside down on the cloth.

You said the town was beautiful
from a distance.
I pretended to understand.
The gate complained behind your suitcase,
a rusty hinge, the same old note
it made when your mother left.
I stood among the rosemary
until the taxi turned the corner.
Then I brought in the washing,
one shirt at a time,
and kept your room facing the street.

The board flickers between platforms while rain threads the station roof. You have bought a coffee you will not drink and folded the ticket into quarters. Around us, people perform their departures with practical faces: phones, bags, a child asleep against a coat. When the train arrives, its doors open with no ceremony. You step inside. Through the glass, your hand lifts once, not waving exactly, more like checking whether the window is there. Then the carriage carries its lit rectangles north.

At five, the ovens make the windows gold.
You used to arrive with flour on your sleeve,
late enough to be forgiven,
cheerful enough to make it official.
Today your locker is a rectangle of clean metal.
The new apprentice asks where you kept the scales.
I point without looking.
Outside, the delivery bikes begin their morning,
chains clicking over the wet pavement.
Your name remains on the rota
until someone remembers the pen.

I found the map you drew
when you were eight:
our street in green,
the river in a blue so dark
it looked like a crack.
You marked the new city
with a red square
and wrote my name beside it.
The paper has folded itself
along the same roads
for years.

The new resident asked where the bins went.
I explained the colours,
the collection days,
the council's stern little stickers.
You had lived here thirty years
and never learned any of it.
You left behind a shed full of screws,
a lemon tree, and three opinions
about parking.
Now someone from another country
stands at the gate holding a leaflet,
while your old rule about Thursdays
fades beneath the rain.

I keep the south window unlatched
because you liked the room that way.
The curtain lifts,
settles,
lifts again.
On the sill, a stone from your last walk
has gathered a pale rim of dust.
I could wash it.
I could put it in the garden.
Instead, each afternoon,
when the light reaches the floor,
it looks briefly like a small door.