Healing

This is what it always is,
healing,
and what it should be, really.
Still feeling the
long grass
as you sat in it, contemplating death
in October before an empty house.
Still awakening
sick, without that normal verve,
and kneeling
together with no one
to mime your mother on her saddest
days.
It’s when the healing ends, I think,
that everything wanes.
It sighs
and reclines into a chair,
like a widower who
did not love his wife.
And it comes
as the alcoholic burning
of years
down the throat.