Far Away

The first cold rains scurry down the gold
tipped September elms. I know

she will not be in her bedroom, a room
I realize I have hardly entered

these last few years, the door so rarely
unlocked. But walking by with a basket

of laundry for my son, I am pulled
by a thread, I think, of her perfume

adrift in the hall, her door ajar, a window
that must be cracked to the cross breeze.

I set the basket down. The white door
turns on its hinges with a whisper

of my fingers and I step through. Her ceiling
LEDs are not lit, and her desk is not

a mess of bowls and mugs, books and
oil paints No aluminum wrappers from chips

and protein bars. Her purple blanky does
not hang at the edge of her unmade bed.

No, the bed is made. The closet, half open,
is not quite empty. And not balled on the floor,

the tie-dyed T she so often wore to sleep.
When I catch myself in the floor length

mirror, I’m not as small as I imagined I’d be.
No, I don’t look different at all. I’ve lost

now, her scent, that curl of flower that must 
have slipped past me like a wraith, 

like a breath of days spun through years, 
like a rain that hushes the silence.

Copyright © 2023 by Matt W. Miller. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 15, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I wrote this poem the summer before my daughter left for college, when I was already feeling her imminent absence as a cavernous presence. I’m sure I’m not alone in proleptic melancholy, that anticipatory nostalgia for what will be gone. I wrote this not only out of a place of sadness for what will pass, for all the things that will no longer be present, but also with an appreciation for the intensity of these feelings, for how lucky we are as humans to love so much, to feel such beautiful hurt, even before the hurt has happened.”
―Matt W. Miller