After the Body

They are no longer here
in the way we understand here.

Something has loosened.

Not vanished.
Not gone.

Only released
from the form that held it.

What we called a life
gathers itself differently now.

It is not upward,
not elsewhere.

It is a change in pressure,
like air after a storm,
when everything is the same
and not the same.

We try to follow.

We imagine distance,
arrival,
some field where all is made clear.

But what if it is closer than that.
What if it has not gone far enough
to be named.

A warmth remains
where a body had been.

A shape in memory
that does not stay still.

You feel it sometimes
without warning.
Not as grief,
but as a shift.

As if something were continuing
without needing you
to understand it.

We want an answer.

Instead we are given
this movement.

This quiet rearranging
of what was certain.

And the sense,
not provable,
not finished,

that nothing has ended,
only changed its way
of being held.