For You

I keep thinking
I’ll tell you something
and then remember.

It’s usually small.
A book you would have liked.
A sentence someone said
that you would have stopped
and made us look at again.

You had that way of doing it.
Not loud.
Just enough to turn the room.

I didn’t notice it then
as much as I do now.

You worked with people
who didn’t think they had a voice.
I remember how you waited.
How you didn’t fill the silence
for them.

You let it come.

I’ve tried that since.
I’m not as good at it.

Sometimes I hear you
in the way I read a line,
as if you’re still there
just behind it,
asking me to slow down.

You lived in different places
but it was always the same work.
Waco, then later
those long halls at Yale.
Different rooms, same attention.

You never made a show of it.

I don’t know where to put you now.
There’s no place I can go
and say, here.

Just this—
a habit of thought
you left behind.

A way of listening
that wasn’t there before.

I use it sometimes
without thinking.

Then I stop.

And remember.