POETRY: Your Silhouette
Your Silhouette
(with Chopin's Nocturne in E minor, Op. 72, No. 1)
My silhouette,
the hours are resending.
Each one returns with music in it,
bending the air around the same
unfinished sorrow.
I see your hands.
I hear your soft laugh.
But your smile will not come to me.
It stays beyond the music,
somewhere in its own land.
The nail of the moon barely shows.
Night birds make their sad, small notes.
At the rim of the sky
a tree is bent gently,
and in its thin black shoulders
I see your silhouette.
Nâreshin is folded into another hour.
Its distance has no opening.
Young women laugh on its corner,
and their laughter travels backward
toward the boy you were.
How little you knew
how wanted you must have been—
how wanting stood around you
without casting a shadow.
And I am here, so far.
No one knows I am dreaming of you,
not even the moon confesses it.
And then alone,
I suddenly know that
no one hears the atrium
when it falls asunder.
No one sees the mountains inside it
toppling into unyielding rivers,
or the rivers running away
with my courage.
Only your silhouette remains—
thin, almost unfinished,
keeping its place in me
after every other image closes.
It keeps me hungering
for another sunrise.
You are the only shape the morning keeps.
This is not happiness.
Perhaps it is the birds,
their sad notes worrying the darkness
until my tears begin.
Perhaps it is E minor
opening and closing
like a black fan in the room.
Perhaps Chopin turns in his grave
because I have made a dead man
carry the absence of a love.
But it is true:
first, the silhouette.
Then the eternal.
Then the laugh—
startlingly sweet—
then the strange friendship
which had no proper name
and entered everything.
Now the nocturne is ending.
The air is not.
And still,
your smile does not come.
Only the shoulders of the tree.
Only the thin, dark shape of you.
Only the moon's small nail,
holding the night in place
while I am left beneath it.
Marni Fraser
0703.2026
IV:V P.M.
Hummingbird Houses | 0714.2025 | Canon EOS R
