This Year

This year, you died.

So silence gags my hours.

Summer came, it’s muffled face

An old man, blind, white-eyed.

 

This year, I wore you as an overcoat,

Your white fingers combed my hair,

and lay for nights with your last breath

stuttering up against my own throat.

 

This year’s weave was heavy-sewn

In the only blue of that blue.

A day can make a reel, unwind the sky.

It’s seam-line pinning days down.

 

This year, the dying months are undone.

Falling leaves, unbutton, the world unclothed.

Bathing in the river under the snow

Stripped. It ends as if it hadn’t begun.

 

Next year only knows you dead.

The singer sews a different tune.

But I’m afraid to wear this new cloth

With nothing of you in its thread.

Inhabit

There is a certain comfort that time brings

The old habits, long-lived, as yet unlearned

But I forget to look out for these things.

Brought up short by all we might yet miss

The tricks too soon to know by heart

When I think: you know this, you must know this.

Like how to make the bed or brew the tea

(I like mine scalding, the coffee black)

Yet still you know enough, so much of me.

So when my unconscious mouths words that drop

In breathless, unheard prayers I hardly hope you know

Saying: do not stop, please, do not stop.

You do

And so you don’t.

The Snow Before

Sometimes, in the early morning

before you know,

you know

Somehow; through the night, it has been snowing.

In the warmth of a sleep-soft bed

long fingers

quiet, white

reach out, put the thought in your head.

More than thought, you’re certain

and just then

and just there

you’re the conjurer before the curtain.

So something wakens the spirit in the lungs

bright light

creeps in

shines behind the flesh-shrouded bones, change comes.

And so, before you are aware

of what was not

the feeling knocks

at the dust sheets.  Stirs up the musty air.

And in that instant blood stutters

hands reach

and pull apart

your ribs.  To split boards, to fling  shutters.

Beyond the thought the old bare ground is laid

untouched

retouched

for such opened eyes the world is remade.