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Past Tense

The old chiche: “after you—
no, after you, Alphonse—”
This is
after you.

The visible invisible, you’ve become
the lump under the bedclothes
that’s only a hump of pillow,
a shadow in the window
that’s just a curtain’s lift and droop,
the one I come home to
who isn’t.

Sometimes after a song
a note lingers in the air,
a hum I want to hold on to.
Your laugh—a bark that turned heads—
where is it? I can’t find it,
like my keys, lost so often—
(who will find them for me now?).

The mirror’s gone blank—the me
you gave back, gone. Simultaneous
division and subtraction, two
reduced to one,
yet I struggle to compute.
Nightly I fight to claim the center
of the bed,
but fail.

The bang of pans and shove of drawers.
Squeak of chair across
the floor. Mobile face, strong tastes—heat
and light—there was so much of you—

then, quick, dimmed, twisted,
all sucked away to that absolute
uncanny cold.
Gone.

—
Maya Muir spent her professional life as a freelance journalist, book reviewer, and school administrator, writing fiction and poetry on the side, and recurrently turning to poetry. She’s lived in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and LA, but now has deep roots in the wonderfully varied and beautiful state of Oregon.

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Have you read these poems:
Dreaming My Alaska by Royal Rhodes
1913 by Craig Cotter

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