Ironwood Chronicles

The book we used to read together

is damp at the spine,

Its paper drunk with rain and the smell of forgotten afternoons.

Your handwriting runs into the margins like secret tributaries,

Turning sentences into maps that lead nowhere and everywhere.

I fold each sentence back into the crease like a ritual,

Searching for the place where your voice became a question.

Wind plays like a cheap harmonica

along the window slit,

And I answer in bursts,

small and stubborn as moths against the lamp.

We built small monuments made of coffee cups and cassette tapes,

A miniature archaeology

of the life two people thought was infinite.

Sometimes I stand and count the cups stacked like argument,

Trying to find the one that holds the shape of you.

Let the symphony carry our small confessions like contraband,

Let the chorus be a banner for all the things we were

unwilling to name. Guitars will scrape the cough of the world,

strings will swell like held breath,

And the drums will sound like someone knocking softly

but insistently.

When the rain arrives it reads the book aloud,

page by page, Each drop a footnote that cannot be argued with.

I listen for your laugh in the falling water

and hear only room tones,

A kind of muted applause that settles into the corners.

We will sing for the pages in the rain,

for the binding that has loosened,

For the sentences that refuse to belong to anyone but us.

This is not elegy alone

but an act of stubborn tenderness,

A liturgy made from coffee stains and underlined words.

We will sing for the pages in the rain,

for the binding that has loosened,

For the sentences that refuse to belong to anyone but us.

This is not elegy alone

but an act of stubborn tenderness,

A liturgy made from coffee stains and underlined words.

You left a scarf on the chair with the smell of another

apartment, A scarf that remembers the architecture of your neck.

I put it on some mornings to remind myself how warmth feels,

And the mirror answers with a face that is almost mine.

Sometimes the scarf hums with the radio stations from your past,

Broadcasting songs I used to hate

and now cherish for their distance.

I rehearse small apologies in the kitchen,

even though the oven is off,

Because apology is a language the city understands intuitively.