You're the bitterness in my vanilla,
the wisdom in which a black garden grows.
You hide in my cupboards, jars of flour, sugar and salt.
Your face shines up from books I'm scared to read.
Yours is the voice i can't hear on the phone
answering the questions I no longer ask.
You haunt me with stories that I can't stop telling.
Every rock, leaf, birdsong and star
a word you never finished saying.

Flitter and horsefeathers when I stub my toe
silence momentary pain,
as a deeper one grows.
So many things go on growing
As if none of them realized
without you it's high time they stop.

Frying breakfast and pipe tobacco,
signatures on my heart.
Creaky screen doors, I expect you
covered in clay, sawdust and weeds.

On and on, the common and mundane
compose a hymn I can't stop hearing.
You were supposed to be the grass that withers,
the flower that falls.
                                    
                                   How very like you to question, and appear as neither at all.