The stairway sits empty
In silent echoes from yesterday
When so much
Filled the halls, darkly,
Like a performance at Carnegie Hall
After all the music dies
On one cacophonous note

I left the cemetery that April day And drove to the old farmhouse Where I’d grown up. Dead leaves shattered As I walked around the house I hadn’t seen in twenty years The tree branch that had held the rope swing, The grassy space by the woods where I’d played… Still there. The trees, just beginning to show new leaves Let more light reach the ground than under summer’s Dense canopy of green Broken beer bottles, left by hunters, I guessed, lent sparks of light To the dried leaves that had piled up for years Shards of broken glass hung from the frame Of my old bedroom window Paint had worn

Many years ago, this day,
As lingering clouds
Brought out the morning rays,
I heard the east wind drown
In the sound of the ocean spray.
 
She came in nightly
On a foaming swell,
Lady floating lightly
On a seaborne shell.
 
“Oh bury me not
In the deep blue sea;
Oh bury me not
Where the cold wind flees.”
 
I carried her home
For miles and miles . . .
If only I’d known
It was just for a while.
 
The words unsaid, undone—
Gone before our time had run.
 
The whispers ceased