The air was still today—
no wind to move the trees,
the merest brush of cloud
fixed, as the earnest daub of white
on a child’s blue canvas.
Last night I felt of the stillness of you,
the transition of your breathing
a quiet subsidence of strength,
a drowsed descent into unconscious.
And though I willed the world to whisper
a passing car, careless
of the silence it might fracture,
woke you,
and I relinquished you again
to the ante-meridian emptiness of the road
that took you home.