Neelamani Sutar Poet Free verse

The Frequency of Absence

I build these walls of ironed shirts, 
a schedule kept with surgical precision, 
the professional cadence of a life 
that believes itself fully grown. 
I talk of taxes, of travel plans, 
of how the city weather suits my lungs.

But she is listening to the static 
between my sentences. 
She watches the way I hold the teacup, 
my thumb tracing the ceramic crack— 
that minute fissure she recognizes 
from a scraped knee in the garden, 
twenty years removed.

She does not ask, "Are you hurt?" 
She knows the syntax of my silence. 
When I offer a practiced, plastic smile, 
she is dismantling the artifice, 
reading the frantic pulse at my throat like braille.

I am a sprawling architecture of adulthood, 
fortified by solitude, 
yet she maps the topography of my grief 
better than I do myself. 
She keeps the phantom child in the foyer, 
waiting for the shoes to be untied, 
waiting for the heavy, grown-up coat 
to be hung upon the hook.

There is a radar in the maternal marrow, 
a constant, pulsing transmission 
that refuses to drop the signal. 
Even when I turn the volume down, 
even when I disconnect the wire, 
she is there, 
an unblinking lighthouse 
scanning the dark, 
knowing exactly which ship is struggling, 
knowing exactly when to steer it home.

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