Quaver/Beth Kephart Poem

Now you understand
everything. How it was never
what he said or how he listened,
never the violent grind
of his coffee at dawn,
or the caution: Leave me
to what I am, to my idea
of the intransitive.

It wasn’t the way he kept
the birds in seed
or how time idled
in the architecture
of his afternoons,
or how, at night,
he resolved,
or I should say countered,
distance.

It was color.
It was the way
intimation came to him,
and shade,
the way the paint
roamed a glissade
but would not settle.
His assertion of quaver.