“A meditation on death and loss. A free-verse poem, unrhymed, in the style of John Ashbury's early poems in "Houseboat Days"”

The platitudes don’t hold, not here  
where bone-thoughts accumulate in corners,  
where dust keeps troves of what you left behind—  
the teaspoon that never met its saucer,  
the socks, single and hollow as blown eggs,  
the jokes you cast off, mid-conversation,  
falling to the seabed of our living room floor.  

I keep trying, through the window—  
not for answers, not for comfort,  
but to see how light shrugs its shoulders,  
spills blue and ordinary onto this couch,  
making of every absence, somehow,  
an arrangement of shadows,  
complicated, yet momentary.  

Yesterday, I boiled water for tea.  
Paused, thinking you’d appear behind me,  
offering the facts you used to save  
for occasions: a cloud is just condensed longing,  
Or: death is not the mirror it pretends to be  
but a long hallway lined with closed doors.  
What is left, when language washes back  
cautiously, as land after flood—  
not what was taken,  
but what rearranges itself in the silt?  

It is summer now, unexpectedly;  
tiny blue wildflowers bloom near our stoop,  
ones I can’t name, don’t try.  
Sometimes a bird clatters in the gutters.  
I listen, not for hope—  
that manufactured syrup—  
but for small factual things:  
the dust, the living, the comfort  
of old jokes that float, half-remembered;  
the ghost-weight of your footsteps just beyond the room,  
not returning, but never quite gone.

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