My phone-calls swell in strangeness, they caress in sound, using words to simulate the brush of fingertips across my lips. I think of weight, bodies touching, my hands gliding as if on ocean across your back, salt on my lips like the edge of a glass. My calls cry out in darkness and in daylight, shy but willing to bare, to bear, for the price of sweetness, for the delight of it. Send you home singing, send you home to my name. Send you home with hands.
All this week my heart has been aching like a bad writers cliche, feeling as if it was replaced by a chunk of pale bone when I wasn’t looking, when my eyes were glued emptily out the window at my countries endless bramble and trees. It pulled from my chest in magnetic grace for my love, keening at night for his voice. Every face was underlaid with his, every breath fighting to see him like I was living an out-dated novel. This poem came to mind when I wondered what the doctors had to say, when I caught my hand to my throat in pain. I never knew who wrote it, but in luck, someone posted it today in the comments of a friends journal.
Apparently the author is a woman named Pamela Gillilan.
Four Years
The smell of him went soon
from all his shirts.
I sent them for jumble,
and the sweaters and suits.
The shoes
held more of him; he was printed
into his shoes. I did not burn
or throw or give them away.
Time has denatured them now.
Nothing left.
There will never be
a hair of his in a comb.
But I want to believe
that in the shifting housedust
minute presences still drift:
an eyelash,
a hard crescent cut from a fingernail,
that sometimes
between the folds of a curtain
or the covers of a book
I touch
a flake of his skin.
