Looking Outside

​

Those times when you are still,

looking outside at the weather

when I speak,

and the fluorescent light over the kitchen sink

flickers once,

and my words fly against the window

all of them thinner than birds folded from paper

it is then, at those moments,

after the table has been wiped, that

something issues back and forth between

us in a whirlwind of incompletion,

in deadlines passed,

in lists ignored,

in messages unerased but unreturned,

and a moment passes

when we could have spoken more.