Gone
She leaves home so often;
you stop noticing.
Until the day, she doesn’t come back.
Light retreats to shadow,
and everything narrows into a tunnel.
You look at your husband over
dinner, and push
food around your plate. The hours drag
waiting for a call, or a note,
like in the movies, but there’s no bargaining
except with God. She’s vanished
in a perverse magic trick,
out of your life,
into a disappearing box,
just before the magician died.
No words exist
to make her reappear.
She leaves home so often;
you stop noticing.
Until the day, she doesn’t come back.
Light retreats to shadow,
and everything narrows into a tunnel.
You look at your husband over
dinner, and push
food around your plate. The hours drag
waiting for a call, or a note,
like in the movies, but there’s no bargaining
except with God. She’s vanished
in a perverse magic trick,
out of your life,
into a disappearing box,
just before the magician died.
No words exist
to make her reappear.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.--Jon Anderson