so comes a time when nothing matters

a poem for you

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so comes a time when nothing matters

more to me than silence and the eternal ache,
when voices still and murmurs cease
and the house settles with a sigh into its groove
and I, at its very center, am engulfed
in the guts of living, tactile things:
worn carpet and wide walls
and the piano bench creaking
beneath me like a limb, the tune
coaxed out from under these keys,
a shy animal, the one I remember playing
with when I was still me but younger.

Those are the only tunes I play now,
gauzy ghosts, one line upon the last
until I am my older self, and my younger,
and somehow still here, haunted on this bench,
singing ancient songs anew. I knew little
of love when I first learned to play, and yet so much
more than I do now. Now I learn
it all over again, the song halting
along in fits and starts, rivaled by
the creak of this old bench, perhaps a better
judge of what persistent love can do,
of what thanksgiving sounds like.

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