Reading the Words

When you came back from Skye

your eyes were blank. Absence

was the wind's trickle still in your hair,

a murmur, no echo, a murmur.

Your lips parted as if to speak.

No breath came to ferry the words.

It was the end of the day.

I gathered each and let them fall,

p i s c e s   i n  s u s p e n s i o n,

then nothing at all.

Your look was Storr and queer as the words.

I stood at the door, a stranger,

divining the fall, the throw of bones,

coming to know what you knew,

until dusk, too, had inevitably gone.