Most said this day would come, even soon
after the ambulance took your body from us they
said so, though today, now, it is not true.
Simply, I wasn’t fooled about it. I assumed that this day
now, today would come because of forgetting, and
so I hoped against it, this day when time is said to heal—
fought against it, bled every day, that you would stay,
at least this wound you left us with would stay,
and we would encounter your sudden jokes or,
the way you stewed alone
in the corner of those, our last, pictures with you
when the jokes had suddenly stopped coming.
These have seemed preferable to this future day, today, of
the letting go when we meant to hang on—
How much worse than loss to have lost
again, the identity of you with us, the ground now settled,
even the grass green over the grave, as if never shovel-scarred,
this day I hoped would not come, preparing for the future.
Thomas Allbaugh is the author of Apocalypse TV, a novel (electio Publishers, 2017), Subtle Man Loses His Day Job and Other Stories (Wipf & Stock, 2020), and The View from January (Kelsay Press, 2020), a chapbook of poems. His work has appeared in Relief, Broken Sky 67, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, River Heron Review, The Ocotillo Review, and a number of other publications. For the last 23 years, he has taught writing at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. His most recent work has concerned the loss of his youngest son to suicide in 2017.