Trying to suss out whether absence is enemy
or friend, we sit side by side in Adirondack
chairs, our minds in the flames licking up
the chimney’s inner brick face, a fire we started
in the right place for once. It’s okay to get
tired of hearing yourself think, she says,
so long as you don’t feel that I need to know.
But what if I want to know what you think,
I ask, and you just sit there glazed over,
the fire having turned your face to glass?
Then look at me and see yourself, she says.
And that’s why I make a fire every night, I say,
to see myself in your eyes. Hour by hour
I keep it stoked. Sparks burst through
the chimney cap’s fine mesh, shower down
around us. The birds have settled for the night,
the tree frogs silent too. It’s only male crickets
who chirp, I’ve learned—females do not
speak their piece. Listen, she says—like you,
they are still going strong. I am not.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 1.
Jim Tilley has published three full-length collections of poetry (In Confidence, Cruising at Sixty to Seventy, Lessons from Summer Camp) and a novel (Against the Wind) with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. He has won Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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