“I try each day,” he whispers, “to find color and light in the world again. For if I could unblind, my son is not gone.”
“I wear Suzanne’s clothes,” she explains slowly.
“In her gloves, I feel her, and I talk to her children every week, and I talk to her grandchildren.”
He holds my arm. “I have pictures of Phoebe,” he says, “beside candles, maybe fifty. Sometimes I light all of them.”
Still he holds my arm. “When I meet someone I describe Phoebe first, and I have a place where I watch for her, a sacred tree hidden among pine and manzanita.”
They turn toward me and I want to tell them I keep his unwashed shirt. Alone, I breathe cotton and coils of memory.
This poem appears in my book, Blown into Now: Poems for a Journey, and was first published in Passager Journal #27