Alone for a Week

Alone for a Week

I've been shuffling

around the house in my thin moccasins

not bothering to turn on lights

or to use dishes, it is quiet

except for the purr of our neighbor's

mowing his homogenous grass in the last

moments of twilight;

the house is dark except for the night-lights

I haven't unplugged in our daughters'

rooms--- those lights

supposed to chase the shadows away,

as though it weren't light that created shadow.

At intervals, I wander into the family room, stare at

the couch, then the blank TV. I am

grabbing at the tail-end of the hour

as it slips around the clock in the corner and my

hands close around still air.

I wonder how long it will take for me

to use up all the air that spent at least some time

in your lungs, moving through your throat and

spilling over your lips?

I know enough to know that I'm not going to get any work

done tonight. I can't let go of the clock

long enough to get lost in some of this stuff you left so I could

complete, undisturbed.

But I don't think I like being undisturbed

or passing by the orange glow from

our daughters' rooms;

and suddenly as my neighbor completes his last lap across

his grass, the evening has gone deaf

and I know fully that silence is a taking away of

something, a loss.

Were I single like one of my friends, perhaps

I would use my dishes and fold the laundry

seeing how these things all have places in the week,

maybe I would throw open the windows to let

today's air in, but in your absence I find that

silence and darkness have new names

and don't whisper, or rise and fall beside me.

The thinness of these moccasins reminds me of the

ground and my weight upon it---

that I'm still here.