two winters back

What we were went away
without a whisper of protest

(as if protest could whisper).
The phone line was all that held
us in the end until that too
was still, stilled.

For three days after that
I myself was a whisper,
in the noiseless trace of my
breathing aboard the bus

uncaught by sage; by grass
unasked in Wyoming. No one
witnessed my drift back to California
in the barren days of the early year.

Neither touch nor speech could be the arms of belief
for two people always apart.
What one whisper was not able to join
a whisper could easily part.

January 11, 1994 (revised 9/07)