What You Lack

Your psyche’s tangling up
as if with fretful sentient
neural vines, inclining you
to worry over little tics
and twitches, itching
through the whole of you:

there is no hope for this,
it’s surely true, apart, perhaps,
from waiting for the view
to widen and, perhaps,
by facing sliding fears
that manifest (for instance)

in your anger at the phone:
the phone, yes, that’s
the terribly unanswered thing:
the apparatus you are used
each dawn to pressing
soft against your ear

and cheek to bring her
voice and wit and love to you:
this week your dear friend
Donna’s gone and that
feels quite incalculably
wrong, and everything

conspires in her absence
and her silence to remind you
you are quite alone.
Oh, she’ll come back: but
you’ve found out, without
her, what you lack.



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