Half-life of a Saturday
The mug's meniscus still trembles.
Something passed through here—
not a person, not wind exactly,
but the pressure change a body leaves
when it steps just out of frame.
The book doesn't know it's been abandoned.
It lies open at page one-fourteen,
holding a sentence about light
that light itself is now completing.
Dust performs the scene:
slowed, gilded, processional.
Each mote an understudy
for the one who should be sitting
in the chair angled toward elsewhere.
The harbour out there
turns its bedsheets over and over,
never getting comfortable.
The trees reach and reach
and grab only more reaching.
This is not emptiness.
This is the room still listening
for the click of a cup
being set down.