Baseball Weather
       

I read over and over things not written
in the letter. He writes, Watch the Yankees.
I look for his wife's name, try to read his life at home.
No words place her in a room, I find no place
for her to walk up a step, no coat on a bannister,
no faces stay in the house I make for him, nothing
in the house that he does not mention in his last letter.
When he writes, it could be weather
this baseball and books. No blood in the scores.
A year ago he wrote people who died.
He never mentioned names, I imagined them, short
one syllable given names, three syllable surnames,
face with tired eyes, families in wooden pews.
People like the people I brush against every day.
Here, we hold the space he leaves in the letter
over a candle in the kitchen, our power gone
to a storm three thousand miles west of his storm.
What cellar protects us from what he fails to write,
what distance twists her out of the language.
One morning I see her pour milk over cereal,
another he stacks books under an arm, turns
up his collar, leaves an empty house for a classroom
full of the lives he uses to hold the love left.

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Copyright © 2022 Kevin Miller All rights reserved
from Spring Meditation
MoonPath Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission