She is humming in the other room.
Leaves are falling in one window of the room in which I
sit, listening to her, with the door closed.
Her voice comes to me from another part of the house.
And with it comes the image of her face, the way I've seen it
so often throughout our years together,
that look of absence from the melody her body bears forth,
yet present and alert to whatever she's at the time
inclined to, her neck bent toward the task or the thing
her hands are disposed to, possessed of, all of her given,
all of her giving, all of her receiving
the shape, the weight, the texture and grade,
of that momentary particular and instant of her passing day.
Or almost all of her, since part of her
goes on humming, over and over, that one slow phrase of a song
I can't now place.
Humming, in a different part of our house,
while in the window before me, leaves
are falling from out of a gone part of our year.
She's humming a wordless phrase, the song missing, her voice
bearing aloft a familiar bridge, broken off
from the before and the after, a fragment I know, scrap of music
arriving from some unfound room inside her,
where the song, entire, sings.
The song replete, melody, harmony, rhythm, and words,
is singing even as the dead I still love
have gone ahead, as promised, to make
the unknown nearly habitable.
Even while they, as remembered, are left behind in a past
I can't find anywhere.