The Missing Pages
       

He inscribed my copy, The missing pages
as well—no explanations, no regrets,
and yet I felt betrayed, by man or fate.

A familiar April sunset, dark-blue
fragments of cloud crowding
an orange sky—is the vast past

really dead, or acting out in our
absent-minded present? When
I opened his diary: so many pages

half-empty. Play of light, frustrations
of weather. Not think and love,
or know, meet, face. He wrote that

my short hair-cut haloed my face
like zinnia petals, but his poem
seems now to mock skin loosening

from bone, age longer than drought
or rain in his entry log. I count crows
flying overhead, row of minor piano keys.

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Copyright © 2021 Mary Crow All rights reserved
from Sugar House Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission