I’m not spending the rest of my life
trying to sketch him back in,
but sometimes he insists,
appearing behind me in the mirror,
combing over his balding dome,
thin gray wisps the wind
picks up like the wings
of his Chauve Souris, sailing
in the Tall Ships armada,
then through the Panama Canal
to the Galapagos Islands.
Mostly he sleeps in darkness
and silence, like bats in my attic,
but I glimpse him fleeting
through our adult children’s
expressions, and sometimes even mine,
or memories arise of us
with our three young ones in Machu Picchu,
in Peruvian jungles,
in an Amazonian motorized canoe,
where a guide shines his light
into a sharp-toothed caiman’s eyes,
as I hold a child on my lap,
as the sun begins to set
on a snowy, mid-winter day,
well into a new century,
where I’m married again,
when I least expect
his flying right by me—
deaf to my yelps, but attuned
to my least vibration,
bent over a desk, sketching.

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Laura Foley has authored eight poetry collections. Her poems have won numerous awards and national recognition—read frequently on The Writers Almanac; appearing in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry Society London, Crannog Magazine (Ireland), DMQ Review, Atlanta Review, Mason Street, JAMA, and many others; in anthologies such as: Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Laura lives with her wife, Clara Gimenez, among the hills of Vermont.

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