Absence Before And After

The lime-bright spaces of being when you’re here
and adjoining darknesses to follow
stack together the ricket-wood structure that seems
to hover under every insubstantial observation
I lay down like floorboards and call my current thought.

Hook ‘round, fall back, veer nearer my vicinity,
my invisible allocation of intentional warmth
which you know, my superlative, the waxing majority
blows waves in the wheat of you, gusting adoring
with the draft of a nest your blue egg never forfeits.

I sit here, the surgeon with a surfeit of patients,
a stethoscope’s bell pressed firm to his aegis
reaching forth to stenograph the slightest murmur of a life;
long lost painter with a palette of embers,
you must remember, I am your knife.