The Half Life

I spent an afternoon cutting you

out of old photographs, saving

the places you stood and anyone else,

sometimes salvaging myself

with your dismembered arm

around my shoulders.

Snipping carefully, I could

lift you out complete,

the scissors moving like memory;

but more often I butchered you,

scattering your dozen faces,

your hands that seemed to be everywhere.

How easy it was to move

your absence back across the years,

reducing every scene by one,

making past and present correspond,

until the world was severed, then and now,

and my half-life was whole.