21st day after
Catherine Owen
I hear the matched geese cry for life,
unseen, holding distance.
Is it still April, after all this time?
Still the mouth of the month that took you?
The sky is curdled, the mountains numb,
three weeks since we last talked on the phone.
You were happy then, though only hours from dying,
I don't mind if you wake me up in the morning
you'd said and so we'd made a plan.
Now there will never be that voice again,
sparrow nesting in the small dark eaves of who I was,
a feeding I opened my body to, because you told me
I could trust. I am left not wanting anything,
not even death, which was yours anyway, the blood
migrating to your heart in how many hard knots,
breath battening down, the cold
dropping over your singing.