Wait

“The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.” Roland Barthes

In final days in these streets,

the green figs hang,

forlorn as unkissed breasts

The mailbox yawns with a vacant smile

and will not speak of you

Nothing to miss,

dry lashes a metaphor for tears

Who wants or can hold nothingness?

I cannot touch you when there is nothing

to hold touched by you; the curve of your fingers

around a pen, marking a page,

cannot mark me in absence

The shape of your souls’ becoming,

unknown; as you rest in a room

beneath imagined photographs

without my face

Days seep into weeks,

I pick figs that do not ripen,

change a pillowslip on a pillow

that does not return to my bed

This quiet heart knows

that both love and a poem

are work; as well as

things of alchemy.

– © Melissa Coffey 2017

Twitter me @CuriousSeeds