now and then he thought of how much harder it is to be left behind

He had always supposed he would die first, 

before her, though he didn't think about it much.

It was like a secret learned and then forgotten,

a letter that hurts and is hidden away in a trunk.

But he had always assumed that one of many gifts

she would give him would be to bury him,

and that was that, though now and then,

as he cleaned her hair from the drain or

sliced an apple into wedges for lunch, placing

half on a yellow plate for her, eating the rest

as he stood reading her shopping list taped

to the refrigerator, now and then he thought

of how much harder it is to be left behind,

and for a while he'd feel an ache in his hands,

as if her were trying to hold onto something

too tightly. Twenty-five years ago she was already

twenty years younger than he, sitting outside

his office, her name on a sheet of paper tacked

to the door, her name with others, each listed

by the hour: it was always three o'clock with her,

always Wednesdays. And he loved her immediately,

though of course, he hadn't known it right away.

Perhaps one day, as she pulled her books from a bag

and began to ask a question, pointing at a line in a poem,

perhaps he thought of how much harder it would be for her,

perhaps he thought this before he'd ever kissed her,

before he noticed how her glance left a streak

on his cheek for days, as if her thoughts could touch,

could leave the small bruises love leaves early on.

But even then there was nothing he could do about it.

Once, years after, he awoke from a dream where

he had watched her from a stand of black oaks

as she dropped a daisy in his grave. And later,

still dreaming, he had circled in the air above their bed

as she tossed loosely in the sheets without him,

like an empty cup blown with paper down the street;

she had been wearing a shirt he'd left dirty in the hamper.

She wrapped her arms around his pillow

as though it were a sack of stones, as though it held her

in place on the earth, kept her from rising to join him.

And when he drifted on her breath out the open window,

he had reached to grab the curtains; he had wanted

to stay with her, though he was nothing then, a breeze,

his hands passing through the thin fabric like smoke

through a screen. And for the rest of the dream

he wandered through their town disrupting

leaves gathered in the gutters, cooling a hot cheek here

and there: a breeze. He never told her of his dream.

Sometimes he watched her from the porch as she stooped

and straightened in the small side garden.

He watched her pull the carrots from the earth,

how she shook them gently before dropping them

in the basket. She wore around her neck

a small woven sack on a string and in it kept

a quarter: if ever far from home and stranded

she could call. But she was never far from home.

And the sack lifted away from her breast as she bent

to pull a weed; it swung back and forth

like a hypnotist's watch; she took it off only

to sleep. And when he awoke before her each morning

he thought of her alone in the empty house

tending to the three cats, winding the clocks,

the few things he now did, stacking logs

on the front porch each October, phoning for oil

when the furnace went cold, filling the feeder

by the kitchen door. And of course it hurt him

to imagine her alone, as it hurts him now

to imagine what becomes of those who go, or worse,

of those who stay behind as wind, as small eddies of air.

He gathers the laundry in piles, wonders where

she kept the bleach. He lifts the sash, lets in

a soft wind hoping for the smell of lilacs,

though it's early yet, only April. He will have to wait

for lilacs and whatever she planted in the garden.

It is too soon to know for sure what is there.

[James Harms, 'Soon' from New Young American Poets, ed. by Kevin Prufer]