Death
You took the crash course, and me along with you because where else would I be except beside you? Now I study death with the deliberate focus you loved. People are afraid of me, especially couples. I smoke on the porch in your jacket, making the brown moleskin smell, watching planes cross the dark sky as they fly in and out of the airport to the south. I think about quitting. What do we each know now that the other doesn’t? And our children, think of all they know that we didn’t.
Midnight
I lie in bed and call your name. I get up and take another pill. I eat cereal standing on the heating grate in the kitchen, leaving the milk on the table, which would annoy you. It’s tomorrow. I have been reading about the sea, its deep dark cold, its knowledge. I have been living with blackness where you disappeared; clear cold that burns my hands, aches my wrists, the hard nothing between us I try to touch and you have touched but cannot tell me what to expect.
Warm December
Some days I don’t have enough time to cry, and then I miss it. A beaded curtain of rain hangs from the porch roof; the Johnsons have Christmas lights up. This week I’ve been seeing you in the waiting room in a wheelchair: exhausted, willing your blood to behave, to qualify for a clinical trial, any guinea-pig treatment. By then you were a withered man. If you were alive we would go kayaking this weekend, just to say we’d done it in December. Last November we calculated how many times we’d made love. Now there is thunder.
Music
I am beginning to listen to music you never heard. Your mother and I talk about where we think you are now, whether we will ever see you again. My father hangs his head every time I talk about missing you. Who else is thinking about you at this exact moment? Today is gray and damp; the hunters are in the woods, deer dart across the road when I drive at night. Your hand was blue and cold in mine as you died. Nothing has changed. Every day is every day.
