Always the moments just after

Empty Of You

It’s always the moments just after you
make your way from my place, the kisses
goodbye for now, the hugs that must last
until your car slides down the hill into the
crisscross of ornery crows and the dartscurry
of daredevil squirrels, past the place where
the bobcat allowed us to shoot her with our
lens and keep brief company for the minutes
two species might regard one another outside
the story of prey, past solemn horses in their
pens who lift their great heads in hope you are
the sacred bringer of fresh hay and food, then
out at last into the lane where the rest of the
world lives and my smallness only increases.



Weariness consumes the beauty of this world
like a morning you’d rather savor between sheets
equal parts scented cotton and a rain of sweated
limbs that slick the windows to run monsoon.
No one wants to be in control all the time, not
queens, not footmen, not the beggars we pass
on roads we take to pass them. Surrender is a
dropped snowcone on a summer sidewalk, all
the colors run together and only the laughter
makes it okay. But these things take time, the
gentle relinquishing, the forsworn abdicating,
the ascribing a need to know to what can never
be known. So I return to my studio, empty of you,
sit down and listen for what we could not say.

Joseph Gallo
June 18, 2012