After a year, I consider cleaning
out her work desk, the one
and only place she wrote poetry,
a nook under the basement steps,
no window, no pictures of grandkids,
no distractions she explained once
in a rare moment when she needed
to justify the absence, the hours
she invested without me, the niche
a metaphor of our marriage,
compartmentalized, neither one
knowing the full narrative,
the work her personal faith.
And yet I believed in her
when she spoke in tongues
I could not translate,
satisfied with her laughter,
her work desk, leaving it
for now like a gravesite
I will return to.