memoryslandscape:

Why can’t a path without a woman remember?
Why can’t a background lean in?
If so, what would they say to each other?
Would they speak of the lilies
a woman once brought to this water?
Or the arousals she spent in these woods?
All shadowed now by her absence.
But the pond, the pond chromatic
with memory, the grass a green inventory,
including that of a suitor,
the one who first lay in her bed.

Don Welch, section III of “After the Moment of Her Undressing,” Sewanee Review (vol. 124, no. 1, Winter 2016)