Absence
Margaret Wack
Everything I do reflects you as if you were dead:
I am in mourning, the way I watch the sun rise,
your face an apparition in the window like a ghost.
They say that when you die I will forget you
piece by piece but they are wrong: already
I know you only in fragments,
your eyes in the sunlight last Wednesday,
your hardness and fullness in the doorway unexpected,
the red in your beard and the rogue silver
and your puckered mouth. I remember your warm hands,
the smell of mint and tea, your peculiar vibrations,
but not the whole. So perhaps they are right:
this incremental absence is a death, a dying,
I am clutching at your bright shards,
the way you sleep like a desert lion,
you slip away from me, your face eludes me
already, at night I pray to the moon
for you to return.
Margaret Wack has had her work previously published in Strange Horizons, Devilfish Review, and right here in Liminality, among other fine venues. More can be found at margaretwack.com.