By Leath Tonino

he saw, after she had died, the source

of great­est sorrow: they

had not sung together.

they had sung, they had sung, but not enough.

saw it clear, like a light in the village

on a moon­less night

when he was cross-country skiing

   the outskirts,

that light

    he saw so often, out there,

from the out­skirts, blue dusk

become black between stars, black inside

    con­stel­la­tions, and fiercely

Cold.

breath­ing, breathing,

pushing ahead, the thought of her

was the thought of voices sin­tered, the memory

of her the memory

of voice-lost-

inside-voice.

it hurt,

  the wind to his raw

    nose, the blowing ice,

  crystals

to his watery eyes,

and the recog­ni­tion that those few times,

      dozen times,

    hundred times,

  thou­sand times,

were not enough, nothing close to enough.

should have. should have.

should have put togeth­er in what­ev­er ugly tune­less way

   the powder of themselves,

the nothing of themselves:

sin­tered it

   into a song

for forever.

kissed it together

  night after night after night

and morn­ings too.

LEATH TONINO is the author of two essay col­lec­tions, The Animal One Thou­sand Miles Long and The West Will Swallow You. A free­lance writer, his work appears reg­u­lar­ly in Orion, The Sun, New England Review, Tri­cy­cle, Adven­ture Journal, and Outside.

This poem orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 21. Support local book­sellers and inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers by order­ing a print copy of the mag­a­zine.

Photo by Prek­shit Satyarthi