Recessional

And yet the joy recedes, its murmuration vanishes in the shifted sky. I am left with these two hands, pale in the winter light. I turn them palm up to receive what may remain:

the cold white winter, a heart which hesitates and coughs when I start it in the morning, and the ache of feet that have stood too long on concrete floors.

And if I remember adding a drop of menthol when I rubbed your temples, a smear of comfrey to your knee, I remember it only as dream, tasted on the side of the tongue.

You resurrect the scaffolding of heaven – to build again? To bring it down? – and invite me to climb again. I, who have held your beating heart in my hands, and now

hold the light of winter, the dust of a fading sky.