Tonight, at the Kitchen Window

The onions soften in the pan.
A little oil, a wooden spoon,
the ordinary fraud of supper
making sense of an evening.

Outside, the bayou takes the light
and gives back nothing useful,
only the slow bronze of sunset
breaking up among the cypress knees.

I stand there longer than I need to,
salt in my fingers, heat on my face,
wondering where they are now,
what rooms they move through,

whether someone calls them in to eat,
whether a lamp comes on above them,
whether they laugh at something small
and forget, for a while, the past.

Twelve years. The number sits
like a plate no one has cleared.
Not death, not life exactly,
but absence with a pulse.

The pan spits once. I stir.
A heron lifts out of the reeds,
awkward, deliberate, almost beautiful,
and vanishes over the water.

What can love do at this distance
but fail to arrive, and stay?
The sky goes purple, then colorless.
Dinner thickens on the stove.

I turn the flame down.
The window darkens into glass.
For a moment I see myself there,
older than I meant to be,

holding a spoon, waiting,
as though the door might open,
as though evening had misplaced them
and would bring them home.