On the subject of loss, I have nothing to add.
You, on the other hand (am I missing one hand?),
had nothing but addition.
A cluster of choughs caught in a bramble, tweeting,
tweeting. Querulous, garrulous, garroted: their ebon
eyes swell to bursting.
Once, I played a tape of your reading. Your voice,
going down in hooks, hewed close to the lines and turns,
insistent in its arrowed aim.
Windmilling the half-filled basket, I forge ahead.
Sea waves hiss and sigh through the shrub. Burning
sun-shafts leak through my tangled hair.
Words as elegy to what they signify—how I
picked and sorted through yours, night and day,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Now the lane has turned to sand. A blue-red
stigma in the ball of a barefootprint
glows as if lit from below.
But I remember much more, your ink-stained
thumb smearing a migrained temple, the wall
crying out, the yeasty comfort of your apron.
A sudden break in the hedge, and the sea is there.
Pulled into a world of undivided light, my violent
thirst for salt now extinguished.
[Back in the kitchen, baking pans sit empty.
The ceiling-fan cord casts a swinging shadow on an
open book, its pages riffling in the breeze.]