Six Days

SIX DAYS Sleep in that short summer drifted like sweeps of bleached sand. Stone rooted with age. Florida. The lone cry of a dolphin. Men reaping folds of the sea. Herons falling out of the sky like white rain. Before six days, she closed the brief letters against the last arguments. Here were her fragments; some words she had not said, the shirt she had not mended for him, the sleep she had not lain in. He was the man that words would kill. He had held on to them too long. Too many ways. The new words came. They always did, and he was left to sit and measure suns. Before three years, his body was done with it. She gathered her sighs and ignored the answers. No, she could not put away his picture; the green stucco house in the background, the sky smothered with clouds, so she slept. When she awoke, they would drop hints. She would not even go there. Even as the same woman. Not arms empty, away from her bone. Even as her touch, numb from the loving, could not reach him. One minute changing the soiled linen. The other watching birds caught in mid flight on the kitchen wall. The breakfast forks ready on the place mats. Rain singing over the din of the loneliest mornings. Mark R. Conte Copyright Southern Poetry Review, 1978