“A meditation on death and loss. A 30 line, free-verse poem, unrhymed, in the style of John Ashbury's early poems in "Houseboat Days"”

A gentle disturbance, a page fretting beneath a hand—  
light insistence of breeze disorienting the world’s quiet geometry.  
Somehow it is morning again, pulse brushed pale gold,  
memory’s loose untethering scrolling outward—  
the kitchen clock, mysterious as river fog,  
ticks implacably beside yellowed photographs,  
faces more echo than flesh,  
yet I make coffee, the same careworn ritual,  
watch the grounds flower and fall,  
knowing those gone are thinning,  
becoming only smaller increments of silence  
folded between familiar routines and  
the correspondence of birds outside my window.

Death has a patient, uneven gait—  
it tiptoes between the orchid’s rootlets,  
the detritus of a note you once wrote  
or a postage stamp that never crossed the sea,  
returning, unpostmarked, decades late.  
Today, suddenly, your laughter is a glimmer  
reflected from a spoon left in the sink.  
I trace the outline of a thought,  
but mourning refuses to crystallize  
in the old, expected way. Instead,  
it floats in and out, unsummoned,  
as though a message half-read,  
ash flurrying along a closed road.

I am asked for meaning,  
but the sky is too much with me—  
dew trembling on blades of grass,  
brief, weightless, then lost.  
The true shape of your absence  
is less wound than wind,  
a porous boundary I keep crossing—  
each day, something new unfastens,  
beckoning quietly toward  
what language cannot shroud nor reveal.

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