99poems/grieve

I grieve him
every spring,
the one who
did not come.
The one who knew
and could tell
me with his
touch.
It is not as clean
as death,
I cannot grieve
once and be done
with it.
There is no
finishing,
a recurrence
equation,
one and one,
one and one,
I go on all
my life as one,
no matter
who is there.

I tried to put
his shirts on
other bodies,
I have worn out
all the dresses
I wanted him
to see.
The dinners cold
so many times
I stopped
cooking.

He did not come,
I say it every
spring, though
now I have stopped
looking around
to see if he is
there.

I never knew who
he would be,
but I knew how
I would feel next
to him.
I knew how it
would feel when
we put up a
fence, or
planted a
garden,
when he helped
me take the
clothes down
from the line.
And that we
would sing together
on cross-country
car trips.

Our fights would
have been clean,
specific and capable
of ending.
He would have
been private,
but warm
to strangers,
a neighborly kind
of guy who would
have been kind
to widows.

He would have lived
lean and eaten
clean.
He would have done
something good for
the Earth,
and me.

5/12/99