Inventory, After

What we divided: the flatware, evenly.
The books, by whose name was in the cover.
The dog, by who could bear the mornings.
The photographs, by who appeared the happier.

What could not be divided: the six years.
The way I learned to make the coffee
the way you liked it, which I still do,
alone, and drink it, and it isn't right.

You said I've stopped being able to reach you.
I said I'm right here, which was the proof.
A man who must insist upon his presence
has already, by some measure, gone.

I keep returning to the Tuesday in October.
Nothing happened. That's what makes it stay.
You were reading. I was at the window.
The light came in the way it does in autumn,

low, forgiving, making the room look like
a room in a film about people who love each other,
and I thought: this is the whole of it,
this is what I was promised and received,

and I did not say so. I said nothing.
I have gone back a hundred times to say it.
The window. The light. Your turning page.
Each time I arrive and each time I am silent.

Now someone else has learned the coffee.
Now the dog has learned another door.
I am not bitter. I am something worse—
I am accurate. I know exactly what I lost

and cannot make the knowledge into grief,
which would at least be weather, and would pass.
It sits instead. It has a chair. It stays.
It asks for nothing. It is never gone.