VANISHING

Sending missives into the black hole
and no reply.
This invisibility must be what the dead feel.
My father, his long rowing home,
is never far from me now.
My mother always saying, You would have been happy
living a nun’s life if we hadn’t been
Jewish. Not a soul invades
my tiny world day in or out.

Looking always toward the river,
I am lost, as you once said.
Lost, looking there, toward the river,
where you always are.
Not beautiful exactly, but
solitary, inviolable,
all of your own making.

It’s a lie of course. Not a lie exactly,
but my own romantic illusion. I wanted you
like that in those days, complete in yourself,
because I wanted that in me.

Now, in this afterlife,
when everything, even illusion, has been taken away,
nothing tempts me
so much as needing our life together
to have been possible.

Look, out the window, how the leaves
race in the puddle after the rain.
Imagine how it is possible for them to love
their own vanishing, and you have just possibly
imagined me.