I felt for the warmth of your palm against the doorknob gone cold
Searched out your fingerprints etched into the dust
Crisp leaves had made their home in the foyer
Crunching under foot
Listening for the steps to be yours
The hearth gone quiet...cold
These memories of you
Surviving in our eternal Autumn

Come sit lost knight
At the table for ghosts
Draped in webbed memories
Of victory and battle
Clandestine glances
Bloom and blush long buried
Delicate sighs of ladies
Echoing in the ether
Ghostly kings reminiscing of laughter
Wearing robes of sorrow
Lifting silver cups
To lurid lips
Vapored fingers touching life now gone
Come sit lost knight
At the table for ghosts
Where we dine on shadows
Entombed in time

Sometimes I still miss my father
I daydream of what his words might have been
I imagine that he is having a conversation with me
Or that he's painting with my sons
Maybe teaching them how to fix a car
Or build a motorcycle
I envision him sitting around the living room
Or kitchen table
Maybe sitting out back with us having his morning coffee
Caught up in one of the many
Indigenous people's issues we talk about regularly
My father who always claimed he was born to the wrong body
He was meant to be a native man
He'd been saying it since he was 6 years old, his mother tells me
That's why he was only ever with indigenous women
I picture his smile
His laugh
What his movements might have looked like
I don't question whether or not he'd be proud of me
I know that answer
I do wonder if it ever makes him sad that he can't be here
He can't interact with his grandchildren
or me
or my husband
this family that he always wanted
He can only watch through that impossibly thin veil
Sometimes I can feel when he's near
Occasionally that makes it harder
Sometimes I even feel him and my father in law together
Hanging out like a couple of old native guys
Laughing at our craziness
Shaking their heads at us
Wishing we knew how close they were to us
We're almost at another Autumn Equinox
The veil is getting thin
I always feel them when it's like this
So incredibly close
Separated by nothing more than a veil

Let's have more of those safe conversations
You know the ones
Where we talk about music and writing
The ones that an onlooker would think are meaningless

Let's have more talks of coffee
And games
Of the weather

Let's have more talks of nothings
The ones where each word
Unfolds into another language

The language of great poets
The ones that capture the broken
With blunt eloquence
The ones that describe the desire
With the sharpest point of their pen

Let's revel in the riveting
The poignant
The masters of poetry

Let's have more safe conversations
Because we talk of the most unsafe of nothings

Television show memories
Memories of a lover
That lover that seemed like they held the potential of forever
Deep gazing eyes that said everything and nothing because it was all felt inside
Gentle featherlight strokes along the lines of each other's body
Allowing your fingertips to build memories of warmth
Muscle
Smoothness
Scent
Followed by the build up of hands that can't grab enough fast enough
Kissing scenes that capture the passion you once knew
Kisses that could barely contain the desire
Deep breath kisses that took in their entire essence
Taking quivering pause to look again into their eyes
That slight smile before demanding their mouth again
Desperate to have as much of them in you as possible
So you could hold onto fleeting moments and
Commit them to memory where they could live forever
These shows carry us to lands we've never been to
And still we recreate that magical relationship
It remains perfect and pure
Passionate
A fire that forever smolders
Because for a time, you were that show
In any part of world
It wouldn't matter because you could've been anywhere
In anytime
And it was with them
So it was everything
You just didn't expect the episode to end so soon