Nobody Gets It

People say
you haven’t really lost them.
They’re alive.

As if that settles anything.

It’s been twelve years.
No calls. No address given.
Only what can be found
the way strangers are found
a name, a photograph,
a trace left somewhere public.

Enough to know they exist.
Not enough to know them.

The holidays pass in order.
Christmas. Thanksgiving. Easter.
Days designed for return.
Nothing happens.

So what is it I grieve?

Not death.
There is no body to account for,
no moment to point to and say
it ended here.

But something ended.

A daughter who might have called
to say she was happy,
or not happy.
A son who might have said anything at all
where he lives,
who he loves,
what he has made of himself.

There are the old scenes.
Auditoriums. Fields.
A stage light catching her face
as she sings.
A kite pulling hard against the wind,
his hands learning the line.

They remain,
but thin out each year,
like photographs left in the sun.

Even looking is difficult.

What replaces them
is not memory
but invention
a future that once felt certain
and now has nowhere to go.

You learn to live beside it.
That is the skill.

Then something small
a song in a store,
a child’s voice in a parking lot,
a boy running ahead of his father
and the whole structure returns
without warning.

Not what was.
Not even what is.

But what should have been
continuing.

There is no name for this.
That may be the worst part.

Only the fact of it
they are somewhere
living their lives,

and I am here
with mine,

and nothing
connects them.