It is not just a quiet.
It is a fog bank,
and through it you fumble,
grasping at things that are not there:
the phantom pings of new emails
that have not arrived, the
I-could-have-sworn-I-felt-it buzz
of a cellphone receiving a text
from seven hundred miles away.
Your heart leaps up
and then your heart sits back down.
This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.
