“A free-verse 20 line poem, unrhymed, in the style of John Ashbury's early poems in "The Double Dream Of Spring””

A brightness staggers into the stairwell—  
Not morning, but the idea of morning  
clumsily slipping between windowpanes,  
as if an errant breeze could toe the filtered edges  
where the walls once carried childhood sketches  
and the furniture arranged itself daily  
to catch the light in different pockets.  
The telephone rings, its insistent notes  
ricocheting against the long corridor of expectation,  
but no one answers—the silence  
settles like dust across a porcelain teacup,  
forgotten on the kitchen counter since autumn.  
Earlier, you spoke to the maple,  
whose limbs crook and stretch, unsatisfied,  
embodying the gesture of unfinished conversations.  
Beyond glass, the city’s minor uprisings—  
a man whistling past a barricade of parked cars,  
sudden laughter, the cat leaping into a patch of soft sun—  
all these fragments arranged gently  
surround the ordinary,  
their meaning suspended, trembling.

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