Our Own Making

My Teacher Makes / Reinvents the Universe
You left as if you foresaw it: this end, the heaviness you could have no longer borne
after all these years in the city. We were once all of us strangers
to it. Like you, over time, we found our own ways and words
for the losses, and if I could draw a trajectory to my own reinvention
it might have all begun in this room: your pen
clicking on the table as if with it you might have found
a better explanation for what you would not name.
You sought in it only what came after; I wanted only a word for the bruising
beneath your eyes, if only a phrase for the ache, as if we might have explained it into
vanishing. If I had known what it meant—to be seated where light filtered in
so purely; to be at a loss for words when yours were so abundant—I might have known
it was only a matter of patience. You spoke with stillness only to stir up everything
relentlessly. Then by summer you were gone.
Even now I hear your voice; read poetry in it; picture the room and everything
in the soft window light; all of us as if made of glass.
You, who knew what it meant each time we laid ourselves open
for scrutiny; the silence after; the met gaze across the wide, white table. Hours of our own
making and unmaking. To know if I am but a speck at least then
it was within this galaxy of our own. Everything we did
to feel significant, later let ourselves dissolve—
or rather, to find that we had wanted both things.
I will imagine you like this: some evening
in the fall: low light oozing over glass: a poem mouthed softly
in the driver’s seat of your car, and you: nodding your head, as if to music.