You Who Isn’t There

So the bookshelves that never were stand empty

now as they always did and the dream of gardens

that never grew, tomatoes and rows of herbs,

lavender shrubs and the stems of sleeping onions,

all wither now beneath the falling snow of dull reality.

So this silence grips you like a second skin

and your hands cup only echoes

as streams of summer gnats appear and vanish

under thrumming lampposts

and you slump in your sweat-stained chair

seeing the evanescence of so many dreams

and those words she’ll never read

and those words you never wrote,

lights in the darkness,

phosphor skyline on a receding shore,

drifting,

as you think Again

and somewhere at the end of it she speaks to you

as you watch those little sparks flare beneath the streetlight,

flare and disappear and you wonder

Is there music here?

And somewhere a dog begins to bark

as in the selfsame voice she once confessed

I love you

she says:

This is going to hurt.