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
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