Unreturning Truth

 

Unreturning Truth
My heart still keeps its quiet room for you,
a lantern hung behind the ribs,
its flame unquenched though every wind
of choice and error has blown through. I chose the door that locked behind me,
turned the key with shaking hands,
mistakes like stones dropped in a well—
each splash a month, then months again. Time stacks its silent bricks between us,
walls of April, walls of June,
until the calendar itself becomes
a sentence neither heart can overrule. I know the shape of you by memory’s light,
the exact weight of your laugh against my chest.
Yet knowing is the cruelest kind of staying—
a love that lives, and still we never rest. So I carry the “we” like a broken compass,
needle forever pointing where we were,
while the road I walk grows longer, colder,
and the woman it leads to is never her.