Quaver: A Poem

Throughout the many iterations of the novel I yesterday finished writing (and, oh well, yes, I admit, I was working on it at 3 AM today), a single poem has been my guide—a piece I wrote a few years ago.  This poem doesn't appear in the book.  But its ghost will always hover. 

Quaver

Now you understand

everything. How it was never

what he said or how he listened,

never his inviolable timekeeping,

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 the hours idled

in the architecture

of his afternoons,

or how, through it all,

he resolved,

or I should say countered,

distance.

It was color.

It was the way

intimation came to him,

and shade,

the way possibilities

roamed a glissade

but would not settle.

His assertion of quaver.