Late at night in the house by the woods
I hear kids walking home from the tram
their voices as faint
as the beginnings of rain
they draw near and there are words
yes, fourteen or fifteen,
I know, definitely fifteen
boys speaking to one another
while conversations run around and
beneath them like underground streams
At their age we drove everywhere in cars
our voices floating free of our bodies
out open windows the way sky lanterns
will rise of their own burning
making similar notations of tally
the car’s motor our track times days until summer break
we yearned to measure everything
pin it to the earth as we floated through
The streetlamp throws a pale white glow into the bedroom
nights we’ve spent in this bed awake breathing in each
other’s dreams waiting for the phone to ring in last days
when talk stops and deep silence has opened up
as far away someone we love enters that most private moment
the ultimate final solitude a wood so deep a voice cannot
depart and yet we huddle round ask for words
and sound and acknowledgment
when what the voices are becoming is a sound
beyond sound one near when far and forever
I remember hearing it her voice after she died so close
like she was there on the bed the way when I was small
she would lie next to me speak softly into my ear
what trick of evolution gave us this ability to soothe ourselves
with the sound of our departed there is no such thing
as a swan song when one dies its other half simply goes
briefly silent Now the kids’ voices are so near as
if they are walking through the room
I sit up to greet them, leaving the bed
to stand by the window and mark their arrival
in that brief slip of time they’ve passed by
the front of the house and have become a shadow
of bodies departing the gray-green dark
voices softer and softer it’s as if
they have never been here at all