I still fold the blanket to your side of the bed Like the cold has a shape and your shape isn't dead I talk to the window, I talk to the rain I've gotten so good at rehearsing your name The photographs yellow but I can't look away Your hands on the railing, October, the bay The light was so golden, you laughed without sound And I was so certain the world would come round But the clocks are still turning without any cause And the living keep living through all of the loss And I am just standing in somebody's grief Holding a season that won't give me leave Oh, what does the water keep beneath all that beautiful dark and deep? Your voice in the undertow, pulling me down I am not drowning — I'm learning to drown Oh, what do the living do when the shape of the world is the shape of you? I carry your absence like stones in my chest Too heavy to hold, too holy to rest There are mornings I think that I've finally healed Then something as small as the way a door feels The weight of it swinging, the click of the latch And I'm back in the kitchen, the year of the last You were cutting an apple, you didn't look up You were humming that song that you never got done And I didn't know then what I know now too well That ordinary moments are where people dwell When they're gone I've started to envy the things that forget The kettle, the curtain, the dog with no debt to memory, no altar of absence to keep No vigil to hold at the threshold of sleep But I'll hold it God help me, I'll hold it Because forgetting you means you were never here And you were here You were so here You were every here I've ever known Oh, what does the water keep beneath all that beautiful dark and deep? Your voice like a hymn in the marrow, the bone I am not lonely — I'm learning what's lone Oh, what do the broken do when the wound is the only door into you? I'll bleed every morning if bleeding means this that you happened that you mattered that none of it missed What the water keeps, it keeps forever. What I lost, I lost while loving. What I'd give What I'd give.
