Day 8008 (Bloomsday)

Day 8008

I roll off the same bed

–grandparents’ wool mattress-

you were carried from naked

in a long black box

the young men struggling

down the four long flights,

your absence still palpable

in the sticky Barcelona morning;

in the bookmarked

Cien años de soledad;

in the table I write on, scarred

in the long ago move, refinished

by the carpinter who replaced 

the floor your chair scratched up,

whom I wave to on the street

every now and then.