by Margaret J. Hoehn

The years have taught me the intricate
forms and weights of gravity;
go, going, gone; leave, leaving, left.
The changing shapes of these words
are the gathering forces of all terrestrial
bodies as they fall toward the center of
the earth. And my blue-fallen sister,
the space that is left where you stood is
the stone that I carry with me always.

Each autumn, an arrowhead of wild
geese flies further into my heart:
sharp harbinger of change.

Your absence has made me the bereft
mother of a missing child: I must go
back to all the imagined places of loss to look,
and then to look once more.

I have walked back against the
curve of time to find you, into
the shadows of the houses where
we slept, into the hazy lot behind
the old five-and-dime where you
whispered with your friends, into
the dark dreams of the doorways
from which you had already left.

In the fall, the heart is
a bright twig of kindling; a radiant
flame that must watch itself burn
toward its own cold ending.

By will alone, I raise you now in my
mind through the fallen days and frost-
stunned air until you stand before me,
once again as you were at seventeen
in the last photograph I have of us.

There is a gravity to each leaf that falls;
the days falter beneath the shift in weight.

On the thin paper promise of black
and white, we stand side-by-side,
smiling, same hair and eyes, but you
taller than me. And I think now of
those distant mornings when you sang
to yourself while dressing for school,
releasing the sweet notes of your life
into the new day with a longing so
palpable and clear that I knew even
then you were a restless wind, you
were the changing syntax of a season
already moving on.

Crossing over the white-scalloped edge
of that Kodak picture as if it were a
picket fence around a girl who could not
breathe; you stepped out over air, like
those first turning leaves that push away
from the trees, from the limbs that held
them, as if by reaching the ground they
could stop that long fall.