© 2012 Steve King
All
rights reserved
When you
labored your last breath,
I had
long been elsewhere.
Bad news,
they say, travels fast,
though it
seems, not far:
I, who
once knew much of you,
was then
unknowing.
What are
lifetimes, looking back?
Yours
read well enough to me
even
without note of us,
or other
quondam artifacts.
No
indeed--our trove lay deep,
hidden in
the secret bottom
of some
misplaced trunk,
while
others that I never knew
gathered
then to carry you.
Better to
have never heard:
another
year—who
knows?—
might
well do all for me;
or better
yet a courier
less
inclined to squander news.
Nothing
now points much to old scenes—
though I
still choose my moments
to puzzle
over absence,
and the
haze of ancient afternoons,
or sometimes
on fabled afterlives
and happy
tales of immortality,
which
have always seemed to be
no more than an apology
for
absences writ large,
unbreachable.
Yet will
I hold these things aside.
and let the
skeptic's surety be tried
upon the
very thought—
that there
may be
a shadow
of forever clinging near,
so long
as this remembrance visits me.
