I Reach For You
and I reach for you...
There are evenings that arrive
with their pockets full of silence,
placing small shadows on the table,
leaving the windows open.
The lamp leans over my book.
The walls practise their patience.
Somewhere, a clock divides the dark
into pieces too small to hold.
I think of nothing.
That is the lie
I keep telling myself
when I have grown tired
of performing.
Outside, the maples lift their branches
toward an indifferent heaven.
They ask for neither rain nor mercy,
only the right to continue asking.
I reach for you, and I reach for you, but I still find my hand empty.
Perhaps the hand has its own memory,
a quiet animal beneath the skin
that knows what belonged there
long before I deserved to know.
So I close my fingers
around the unfinished air.
I carry it with me
from hour to hour,
this invisible weight,
this shape without a name.
By morning,
the light will enter as it always does,
touching everything,
leaving me jealous of its grasp.
And I will open my hand to find nothing there,
but the warmth of having reached.
