“A free verse, unrhymed, in the style of John Ashbury's works in The Double Dream of Spring”

What I imagined this morning,  
heaped along the ridges of the kitchen counter,  
sunlight thawing butter on old plates,  
was a city assembled from the migrations of spoons.  
They return, always, scraped clean of their meaning,  
angled at the end of the aisle.

It is June, or not June—  
an arrangement of days stacked quietly  
in the shape of a question.  
Footsteps travel the carpeting, each foot  
caught in the in-between,  
ready to reconstruct what was forgotten  
in the repetition of opening the window.

There is music somewhere,  
not the music I grew up with—  
that spiraling optimism in small green parks—  
but the kind folded in an envelope,  
waiting to be read aloud to no one  
except dust and the hum of white walls.

We invent these rituals anew each afternoon:  
pour water for the thirsty lemon,  
watch a shadow undress the last of the lilies  
while the television, unlistened, provides company  
to the static’s persistent questions.  
The rooms, unchanged, change us  
with each minute's slight inversion.

A letter lies unopened on the table—  
the return address a place I meant to visit,  
where clouds own names that I will never learn.  
Perhaps in some other hour I will travel  
not by train or road but by remembering  
how the light once fell, precise and undisturbed,  
across my bent reflection in the hallway glass.  

This, maybe, is the marvel:  
seeing the familiar revealed  
not as a song, but the silence that follows it—  
answering nothing,  
and requiring nothing but the luxury  
of another unremarkable morning.

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