You are gone.
I know it is so.
Your mailbox is yawning
bored from nothing to read
or maybe, as if the tube
were a pandiculating dachshund,
the yawn is a calming reflex
or the classic sign of appeasement,
a reaction quite defensible
when the hand thrust thus
so deep into one’s interior
is foreign. Unfamiliar.
You are gone.
It seems to be so.
Your drive, for example,
is as bereft of a car
as the postbox is of mail.
Gone too is the amber aura
of the pair of pendants
that, when lit, shine
softly in shades of sepia
like sexy house bling
hanging from your ceiling.
And they make me remember
a night when smoky topaz dangled
from the ears of a woman in love
whose fingers stroked the stem
of a flute filled with champagne
or—have I misremembered?—was it
her eyes that were filled with seduction?
Ah but yes, come to think of it,
it was both. (It is both.)
I shake off the reverie
and understand
that we have become a circle, so,
away, maybe. Gone, never.
You are as close
as this thought in my mind
this word at my fingertips
this curve of my mouth.
24 July 2021
