Widower at Work

He has promised her he will practice for years

the ways to get along with fewer breaths,

will fill his lungs and find himself a flat place

for when the room begins to move around him,

the floor tilt as if it means to open up. He gives

strings of spaghetti the same spare treatment,

now. He draws up one at a time

from the dinner plate's straggle,

each moment of concentration brought

to the tight seine of his teeth keeps

him thin, he tells himself, this taking time.

When he was twenty his father told him

no good would come of holding on.

His teacher, a painter of absences and loss,

pretended no less. Evenings, he watches the war

of the cars, the street light move shadows

across the wall and he hums a child's song

to the saint whose name he carries to keep her safe.

He will argue with that melody some time

tomorrow but that will be soon enough,

after he has done his bow-downs in the sun.

Such contradictions are the only things

he has come to love, the sweat opening

to welcome its brother the rain. He helps

the voice of her memory walk across the road

after dinner as the night owls come awake

to what is left of the backyard's day.