Monday, September 28

However Fine Can Be

The patio still wears its winter dressing.
No one has changed the leaves since June.

Hummingbirds flash
where the coffee used to steam,
then disappear into afternoon.

I set my cup across from the empty chair
where your thoughts once gathered,
and morning, indifferent to absence,
lays its light across the ground.

There were years
we let the Sundays wander past,
too busy with our own living,
certain there would always be another one.

Five children going five directions,
then something older turned us homeward,
back toward the same familiar door,
the place we’d once been in such a hurry to leave.

Funny, the roads we take away from home
and the roads that bring us back.

Now the noise has stilled.
The sky has cleared.

I’ve learned to live
with what I cannot keep
and to leave a little room
for mystery.

Some days the quiet grows too large.

I reach for the phone without thinking,
my hand remembering before I do,
searching for a number
time somehow forgot.

Then something flickers at the window,
too quick for sorrow to explain:

a hummingbird,
all heartbeat and light,
refusing stillness.

And for a moment
you are not gone exactly.

You are in the morning,
in the empty chair,
in the old instinct to call,
in the small bright thing
hovering where I can almost understand it.

So wherever you are,
rest easy.

There’s nothing here
you need to carry anymore.

The years keep coming.
I keep going.

There’s still some road ahead of me,
and I am learning not to ask
how much.

I’m doing fine,
if fine is what we call
this strange agreement with time:

to love what stays,
to release what cannot,
to keep a place at the table
without expecting anyone to fill it.

The afternoon goes wandering by.

Something flickers past the window,
too small to hold,
too quick to say goodbye.

And I am fine.

However fine can be.