Day 1,301

Judith Harris

There will be a worse day. He will live
long enough to not recognize me at all,
and I sense it drawing nearer with his
measureless stare, the now common
pauses, the rummaging for words almost
poetic in their wrongness, whatever the
brain urgently seizes upon now muted
by the acoustics of emptiness. For now
I keep his gaze, looking through the surface
of his eyes, a pond, drought-contracted,
cleared of dust, my own face mirrored there.
Myself at an impassable distance. At times
he seems himself, nothing amiss. And I’m
the one slowly banished from memory,
as he speaks of me in the third person,
nameless, unbidden, figment of the past.
I will meet him in the unalterable present,
the reminders of love rising and vanishing—
like fog burned off from morning,
then sunlight returning as if it never left.