I Sensed

I knew you were gone. In the startled-now of a wide-eyed night---I knew, though you were beside me all along, I sensed. A cloying doubt, a premonition of you missing fastened tender gums to my pulse. I knew we would no longer teach flesh to speak, knew down and deep even though that thought struck me dumb. A space opened, I saw it from the bottom of a dark stairwell. I saw you leaving in the closing evening of a memory. I remember when my mother died I held the phone away from my ear listening to the nurse run through her rehearsed lines, and I feeling a strained tendon finally snapping. I knew then that 'gone' meant gone away to a place where hands are blind owls. Now laying here in the dark, god knows how many years away from our last touch I know my `once upon a time' has again stepped through a door in my mind that always leads to nowhere.