Oboe’s Poem

Blood is still pooling in the wound where you were cut out of our lives.

The house still remembers you in a thousand ways.

On the couch, your place is there waiting for you

with the white sheet to catch your lamb’s-white fur.

Your sunbeam looks in at the window, falls on empty floor.

Your voice echoes in the doorway, your footstep in the hall.

The sink remembers your snowshoe paw—your favorite play to drink.

Your little girl is looking for you.

Can’t you hear her calling?

She is peering over the lip of the cardboard box where you loved to sleep.

She was caught in the rain; she is wet. Won’t you come and comfort her?

Look, there! Just around the corner:

If I go, I will find you waiting, trilling a greeting, smiling with your honey-gold eyes.

The house holds its breath. It cries at me:

Surely you did not leave him on a cold steel table with the light fading from those eyes?

Surely you did not let strangers put dark earth on his beautiful fur?

Surely you did not watch a needle still the heartbeat of this place?

No. No, no, no, no, no.