The Shape Left Behind

It is strange,

what remains.

Not the voices.

Not the faces.

The places
they expected
to be.

A chair
across the table.

A name
I no longer say aloud.

A path
I still notice
without meaning to.

Loss
does not empty the world.

It gives it
another shape.

The light
falls differently.

The house
keeps one room
closed.

Even joy

learns

to walk around it.

Some mornings

I forget.

Then something small,

the way the sea
holds the horizon,

or a woman laughing
who might have been
my daughter’s age,

and the shape
appears again.

I no longer ask
it to disappear.

It belongs

to the landscape now.