Space from Presence

It seems strange to feel an empty pulse

under a sky like this with these colors,

textures, these remnants of a day’s emotions

and yet I see you there in those clouds

that blue-orange-purple sky and so

it changes what I knew of something like this

in such absence, I haven’t determined yet

how to not feel the magnanimity of missing

how to go through a day without transposition

of everything I know of you as we walked through

quiet colors like this, feeling closeness, the cerebral

hush of holding hands and the whispered I love you

and what seems the still stream becomes the sea

and you’re there, now, and perhaps the sky is streaked

too, with words and the feeling of skin meeting

maybe you, too, feel absence in each shell

those yellow, purple, oranges and maybe

they become the sun we saw rising, setting

and it seems this, this love through memory

spans such a different space from presence

from the quietude offered by your touch

you see, when I’m with you I see the sky

without the weight of a thousand projections

but rather as sky, beautiful arc we walk within

I've just returned from Nantucket, this isn't Nantucket (quite obviously, if one has been to Nantucket), but rather a return from. Though the ocean drew a certain sentiment, it was this, this sky and this notch and this stream that became the pulse of my feeling. While there, though all the perfect distractions from missing were in place-- a friendship, a beach, a brewery, a restaurant worth spending money at, I couldn't help but see my love, my friend, who just went out to sea, in everything. This is, I suppose, how love goes. It is in every breath, and is, I believe, quite beautiful. And so, though I traveled alone, my memories of him, with him, were the surface of my night and day and ferry ride and drive home. I carried missing along quite gracefully, I thought, present and holding, as I allowed the feeling to thread through my movements. Yet, this silhouette of home, of being under a new yet familiar sky, altered my relationship to absence. The quiet threading was suspended by the weight of missing and navigating how to go through a space I've come to know with another. It seems the unfamiliar, though spurring memory, did not have for me the heaviness of the roots of familiar, the endless roots of familiar, that hold a presence known and remembered, and thus also serve as a perpetual reminder of the suspension of another's physical and calming presence, one that enables the present.