Bereavement

This poem, Jamie, is in memory of. This poem is not enough.

What Time Does

To leave you there,
brine in your hair from the sea,
wind on your skin from the car you drove fast,
the radio on,
until we each had named
our incompatible woundedness,
was one thing.
To walk by the room where we’d almost loved
years afterward,
holding my son’s hand, holding my husband’s,
was, is
what time does.

But to hear your name
in a story someone tells
about a man trapped within
the hostile circumstance of his own skin,
is to hear you not dance,
is to see you not say,
is to understand the word
irrevocable,
and the coming feint of autumn.

The trees have been splitting from themselves
where I live.
Whole crowned limbs going down.