The cul-de-sac is quiet
and the front lawn is empty
beneath the shade of privet trees.
She lives here alone with her new dog,
a black lab like our last, like a void
she is trying to fill. Our rooms are quiet
as if a pebble were dropped
into a bottomless well. I stand inside
pondering the white grid countertops—
they’re smaller than I remember.
And outside, the maples,
once-waist high,
tower tall as the house now,
shading decades of valley heat, where I walk
the garage not thinking about
the divorce or them still together,
or the peach trees behind the house
when we first moved. A whole orchard
torn out and replaced with houses.
Where do things go in their leaving,
when they’re uprooted and rearranged
into the next? I tell myself that
a part of them still lives in the emptiness
behind the form, somewhere else
outside the intangible moments of solidity.
Within this world and in this house,
impressions are left where they once stood.
To the right of the fridge, in faded graphite,
the letters E, H, N are etched in white sheetrock,
like rings pulled from the insides
of people. And now I stand here again, echoing
in the emptiness of this hollow house, the outside
loosened in soil, the ends of suburbia
living as memory like form filling void.
And behind it all, before the maples planted,
before the aisles of orchards emptied
and the cul-de-sacs shaken loose,
I can still see her silhouetted in the front yard
right where I left her pulling weeds
in the summer heat while a black lab lays
beneath the shade
of Privet trees.
Eli Coyle received his MA in English from California State University-Chico and is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Nevada-Reno. His poetry has recently been published or is forthcoming in: Barely South Review, California Quarterly, Caustic Frolic, New York Quarterly, Hoxie Gorge Review, The South Carolina Review, and Camas among others.
IG : @elicoyle
Photo by Marcel Kodama from Pexels