Metronome

Sylvia, are you listening
to the sound of tired earth breathing?

Here seasons change,
people fall in and out of love
like a giant subterfuge in motion;

and the green bench in the driveway
still gets covered in snow during winter.

It always snows here in December,
I remember how you’d sit by that lonely window
staring at the nothingness of space,

wearing your vacant smile like a riddle,
your voice laced with ginger and honey
dripping on the metronome.

Sylvia, are you awake
when the moonclock in the distance
hammers away at the silence

and I’m writing for you
like the last man left awake in the city?

Heart upon heart upon heart,
your voice descending like a stone
into the darkness.

Amid the wineglasses and jangling laughter,
your silence growing secretly under our breath
until its vastness chars us.

There is too much laughter
and your voice, impassable and aching
on my eyelids.

Laughterdrunk, rainlit, tearswept,
but it will not go away.

Sylvia, you would always wait for me
when December came
and the lights grew dim within us.

I haven’t heard from you for so long,
sometimes, I press up against an empty window
listening hard for your voice
laced with ginger and honey.

I am turning blind corners on dark alleys
half expecting the streets to conjure up that smile.

Snow covers everything with a dumbness
but keeps hidden painfully
what matters the most.

Everything has turned white tonight,
I know I’m lost,
I should be leaving.

Mostly I know
I am falling
into a metronome.

But I haven’t heard from you for so long
and some nights are so lonely and uncertain
that they refuse to end.