for Cesare Pavese
Today in the restaurant
Your table was vacant
Your seat was empty
You never arrived
Perhaps you have gone away
I mean that happens
Absence
Leaves a vacuum in the familiar
I look past your place and out
to sea
Wide blue never seeming to end
Like an immeasurable sadness
A vastness inside me that makes me
think you will never return
The last of the summer clouds scrape
the roofs of Municipal buildings
and the light of a fading sun pinches
the rooftops to keep them awake
just a bit longer
My Editor will take a red crayon and erase
my loneliness
my sense of feeling lost
He’s not a caring person
.
And finally with a line as thick as
a lipstick streak
erase me
from his life completely
.
Malcolm Paul
Picture Nick Victor
.