September 4, 2018

the quiet, and the cicadas behind it *

Maybe you're feeling it, too, the largeness of space left by absence,
certain days dizzy with so many molecules spinning in the orbit of memory,
the million conversations you're still having with the person no longer
on the other end of the phone. How this kind of missing brings certain scents back -
his homemade bread, the interior of her Lincoln Continental, fresh laundry
drying on a clothespin line in the breeze of a Midwest summer - and when you lift
a glass of cold water to your lips, you hold that first sip on your tongue longer
than you used to. Maybe you'll never be done grieving, or maybe this 
is what grief is, stillness echoing with an elegy that holds the particulars of song,
like a late summer evening blinking into fall - all that quiet, and the cicadas just behind it.