The Finch at the Feeder

December 21


She left on the solstice

and ever since, I’ve been exhausted.

I fall asleep at lunch,

head pressed hard and red on the cafeteria

table, hand holding the fork that rests

in the rice pilaf. There is no one

term for my kind of heaviness. I step through afternoons

in a space suit, everyone eyes me

like I am the alien. Where is home?

The quarter-waxing gibbous. The harvest.

The blue. There are still moons I haven’t kissed

her under. Bareness, obviously. The easy metaphor,

the solar system as a sterile womb. When did the night sky

become impenetrable? Storm clouds in mourning, dressed up to grieve.

Loss is never singular. Often, the death of one star is the end

of an entire constellation.