Birthdays

Goals for November

I will sew two jackets and figure out what to make with the fabric I have

stacked in colorful towers in my sewing room

In November I will make the things promised for a new baby’s arrival

I will finish one sweater and maybe start a new one.

I may go to the gym

I may walk more

maybe.

I will pass through an invisible threshold and into a new decade and

I will never forget you,

the other side of my soul,

and I will never celebrate a birthday without remembering that yours comes the next month after –

and then the count down to Christmas, a gleeful whirling dervish dance of anticipation,

and then new years day and the day after when it all ended on the bumper of some strangers swerving car.

In November, know that I still carry your voice in my heart’s rhythm,

in the lymph and blood of my body and

in each breath that I draw and in every chamber in my thoughts, you still live,

although with every passing year it is longer that you are dead and

I abide

here without you.