# The Poem I Lost I had a poem once— a small, luminous thing, like a bird that landed on the sill of my waking, sang three perfect notes, then flew into the ordinary day. I didn't write it down. I was certain I would remember— the way you're certain about the face of someone you've loved for years, only to find, years later, that certainty was a lie told gently by time. It was about nothing, really. A woman's hand. The light falling through a window. The space between two heartbeats where all the world's sadness gathers like dust. Or maybe it was about everything. The grammar of longing. The syntax of small deaths. How we live in the margins of our own lives, reading footnotes we'll never understand. Now when I try to find it— that poem, that bird— I come up against a silence so complete, so familiar, it might be the silence from which all poems come, the silence we mistake for memory, the silence that says: *This too was real. This too was here. This too is gone.* And I am left with the shape of its absence, which is its own kind of poem, written in the language of things we cannot keep, cannot name, can only know by the way they haunt us with their going.