Recalling Days of Abandonment

The Abandoned Bedroom

That Day Unlike Others

James Hart

All day that day I paced the floor;

I wandered my dark corridors of air.

On my feet all day, I bore a burden,

a totem without hands to hold the sun.

I stared at chairs and fingered books,

and read the straight-backed oak

as if slats were our broken daily words,

fragments you said to me I never heard.

By end of day I knew the story’s end,

time’s black chapters of the mind.

At last I sat on the far side of our bed,

adrift on the side where you once rested,

and remembered words I forgot to say,

love, among others, I’d not said that day.

(Poem from an unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)