With your departure, came winter— paralyzed
in the forgetting of what is lack.
Mothers wept at the train station
come down, don’t leave.

All days turned to faces of weary laborers in coat,
nights to marred images of you by the window:

the opacity of a memory like apparition, evokes
I to map the contour of a memory
towards the forgotten childhood.

Your disappearance is what makes you present.
Is what these bruise-color hands are made for,
to touch, like Rachmaninoff’s fingers to piano—

                          make me sing a theatre of shadow
                                 to recall, this is what I am not.

Over the garden, the moon waters to what is
left: a cradle-song which cries from a distance,
a portrait on sidewalk fading in the rain.

I lay myself on the floor to sleep in your absence
waiting, dreaming you will soon return.