Emptiness
by Steve Dieffenbacher
We loved each other
to fill the emptiness,
conjugated the patterns of clouds,
danced to the voices of children.
At night we looked through windows
at stars and imagined them hot with being,
and this gave us some comfort
when we held our babies close and sang to them.
We tried to grasp this emptiness
in both hands and mold it to our hearts.
We saw it ripen with possibility,
the full pulp of the peach,
even as its outline was all we remembered.
Year by year we watched the fibers lengthen
around echoes of a seedless core.
And so the days rolled over us
toward the blackest colors we’d known,
the plants bursting with buds,
turning to creases in a cobbled road.
We lived in our uncertainty then,
an earth relieved of mounds,
the crystal black and white of winter,
the small sound of the bell.
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