Shadow

Shadow

Golden chalice, good to house a god.  Please

            don’t tell me how the story ends.

                                                Cormac McCarthy

                                                The Road

Aside from his skin, and how it puckered

            in water, faded in the long wool winter.

And his fair hair curled like a periwinkle

            on the floor two or three times

a year.  Aside from the first shirt and short

            pants I made his second spring

and how perfect they slid, straight

            to the knee and never further, (aside

from saving each mistake even with the cost

            of fabric) I miss his shadow

the most.  Because it was still

            in the room when he’d stepped out,

it hinged him to the floor, the wall…and even

            though his straight from play tang

lolled longer, or his fresh from mass or his bath,

            and that I’d walk through and it would be

on me and in me, the evanescent perfume

            was soon mingled and gone:  that shadow.

I’d step on it and we’d neither feel no crick or misery

            while I watched it slide across the kitchen

or the porch or the lawn or the sidewalk

            or the church isle or the grocery

isle, how the ceiling or the sun at once

            possessed him and grew him larger

or smaller than I ever could, and how, all at once, this flat

            closure of everything has made him   

take his leave.  Of the floor.  The wall.  Even these furrows

            and the kerfs I’d never seen

before until now, sitting here, holding a dust-

            rag in the dark incense of his bed-

room.