February 14, 2016. Candies, hugs, warm arms ....

Another Valentine's Day without you... a box of Russell Stover's underneath your picture on the mantel, those old thumbprints; the poem you wrote to Donna when her first husband died, and then she gave to me ... the difference is that you are not lifeless, not mute rather forever present in the years without time.

http://www.extralove.com/carole.html

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Revisions of home.
Books on the mantel.
Chair of ten years.
Dust, the old thumbprints.

Not unusual,
this life after death.
What connects all things:
either habit,
the daily routine
that binds two people
when one is gone

Or an energy
the survivor sits with
in a dark corner talking;

the spirit struggling
to live through all it had known,
until even
these pieces of furniture

seem drained,
no longer practical?

Answers never come.
Accomplishment
the acceptance
of this fact –

then the slow beginning
of nothing familiar,
changes that had never
stopped coming,
distance and its evidence –

until like a dream of a woman
being pulled back,
unable to continue running,
the memory rolls over
gently, lifeless.

Carole Leslie Marcus, 1977