Today’s Change of Heart: An end-of-season poem by Purbasha Roy.
In this song I find you as if you’d never gone—
the skies some unscored skies behind longings,
air smells, marigold leaves we crushed between
palms. Call them translations of wonder. You
sing to me and every syllable peels the silence
that rose between you and me like the ellipsis
of reflections pooled in the rear-view. Distance
now searching for settlement within zero’s
pulply heart. Ours warm and kindly obey
signs of beauty. It requires a lyric for a song to feel
dressed up. When your words stop, I’m open-mouthed
to add my own. All sounds that escape are autumn
things discarded in the middle of a tussle with the wind.
Whomever I loved left when my feelings densed like curd—
what followed: a documentation of how the mouth
turns to a black wound, still in waitness—of whom?