I wish I could describe to you the dense silence when the snow had melted,
and you had left.

It was almost as loud as when you were still
here, but in a way that sharpened
the cruelty behind it.

When I walk through the river of people in the city
and I reach for your hand,
and it isn’t there,
I wonder, abstractly,
if I will ever melt into the flow of people--

until my beating heart sounds no different
than those around me, and it stops squeezing
and stuttering, inconstancies
which serve only to remind me
of you.