“A meditation on death and loss. A 20 line free-verse poem, unrhymed, in the style of John Ashbury's early poems in "The Double Dream of Spring"”

The porcelain hum of morning, a half-listened radio  
Troubling the air, admits what continues without us—  
Coffee cooling on a chipped plate  
Is a phantom, yes, but more a negotiator,  
Bridging rooms where footsteps no longer bother the dust.  
Yesterday, I rewound the film, coarse-grained and accidental,  
April grass slim as an eyelash,  
Your laugh roused by a misremembered punchline—  
A calendar of afternoons I hoard, deliberately disordered.  
What good is the economy of memory?  
A thrush perches on the telephone wire behind the garage,  
Winter leaves tangle their veins along the split fence;  
I consider the possibility that nothing completes itself  
Even now, with your absence so permanent it’s like weather.  
The table, unsigned letters stacked in a blue envelope,  
Product of our secret compacts with longing—  
Isn’t every silence just waiting for a name  
To shape its unfinished drift?  
The shade draws its length across the rug,  
And all that remains is the blurred threshold between  
What I keep and what I cannot hold.

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