What can it mean, that someone walks

out of your house then they won't come

back ever. When you'd had them, and

they were boys; you'd think they'd make

their own way home out of that mud.

He was like a cat, always fell on his feet.

I can feel he's still working in the fields

or is drinking late somewhere—oh I do

know that he's not & yet none of it fits.

Then what could it mean to know this.

We learnt that the line between here

and there is a faint grey, and it gleams

like the honesty's seedpods—as brittle.

But candid somehow. Hard to convey

how it seems fresh, and almost papery.

You could poke a hole and be straight

through onto the death side, where it 

is livelier than here, and a lot clearer.

I never could grasp human absence.

It always escaped me, the real name

of this unfathomable simplest thing.

It's his hands I remember the most.

But that'll go. Some women take on

a wary look and seem bleached out.

They get pierced by a casual remark

that makes them harden or go vague.

"I fought for strength and tearlessness

and found both." What a price, pride.

No need to draw attention to yourself.

So many were left as quiet as you. Do

I go on for years thinking and thinking.

One in all these thousands. Him. Me.

So many gone that you can't take it in.

Whatever I say is bound to sound flat.

I am a gramophone on the subject.

Each day's same horizon to be faced.

You long to fade out into it, yourself.

I look doggedly after a missing figure.

What to do now is clear, and wordless.

You will bear what can not be borne.

—Denise Riley, Say Something Back

Time Lived, Without Its Flow

Holly Margl is the award-winning author of Witnessing Grief; Inviting Trauma and Loss to Our Coaching Conversations, An Enneagram Perspective, coach, coach mentor, and trainer specializing in grief, trauma, and the Enneagram.