shadow life

I love poetry. Recently, while J. waited patiently for me as I endlessly perused the aisles of a bookstore, I came across a collection of poetry. Short weeks later, it is already looking dog-eared from my reading and re-reading. The Possible Past is described as "an incandescent meditation on memory, a restless and illuminating inquiry into the abundant riches and the tensile limits of language." There are any number of poems that I will doubtless post over time, both from this book and many others. Today, though, this one is resonating.

How far I am these days from being a shadow of my former self, so to speak. Still, there are times when unexpectedly, in strange places, I find memories of a woman at once no longer me; yet irrefutably, undeniably me.

Shadow Life
The afternoon gathers itself and folds into an envelope of evening.
The what ifs begin at the door.

A house as familiar as the Brahms I learned as a child -
Every note, the whole arrangement.

The minute hand, the hour. The grandfather clock
minding itself on the wall.

Here, chairs that already have my shape in them.
Books I've read on the shelves.

Not a what if, but a question of inhabitance. My dresses filling her closet;
her sorrows close to, but not exactly, mine.

Upstairs, a strand of my hair on her pillow. In the garden, foxglove
I would have planted, were it not already there.

The mirror in the dining room casting candlelight
onto a landscape of plates and glasses.

Bone china, polished silver. Whole afternoons remembered,
staring out a window not my own.

Later he'll pass me a glass of wine and I'll know exactly
the span of his hands.

What night did I sit up in the bed of this other life,
push back
the covers and walk away from the body beside me?

And what misstep has brought me here?

Somewhere there's a corner that turns into the possibility
of this existence.

The woman beside me having walked past it herself,
and lost something she went back to reclaim.

Aislinn Hunter
from The Possible Past