When the sound of life is
everything
before the music begins
before there is time to listen

a child coughs in the next room.
I wake carefully, pressing an ear
to the last beat of a dream,
to find you’re not here now
and you’re not in the next room.

Carriages of wind move past my window
move disturbance above the pool of the turtle
who periscopes to the surface,
expectant, in the least, for a gulp of air.
I swim somewhere beneath my ceiling
somewhere beneath the air I prefer to breathe.

You’re not here now
and you’re not in the next room.

When motherless children sleep in the afternoon
when grey breezes whisper away the sun,
when an avalanche of crow-call murders the dove
perched on my sill, there is nothing and none to tell
and no circumstance worth repeating at a later time.

You’re not here now
and you’re not in the next room.

 

 

MChallis © 1998/2014