The Way I Miss You

In daytime when light plays over us
even from this all-gray winter sky,
something else is dancing.

It’s always there, the hidden thing
that makes everything possible.
This is how I miss you.

It isn’t that the moon
slips inside a sleeve of night
and vanishes so that anything I see

is a partial thing defined by darkness.
The universe itself that transmits light
hides in the gravity of darkness.

I don’t miss the light.
I miss the shadow
that was our shadow.

*

The Sea Is A Grief

Listen to the old accordion
making sad music
with bones and pebbles,
countless secrets
like hidden predators.

The sea grieves for its secrets,
which are those of a small boy
watching the waves rise and fall
from a pier where a horse dives
with a star-spangled rider

into the foamy water
and emerges in front of the boy’s own eyes
still carrying the woman in the wet shining cap
who leads it back to plunge again
from the high pier into the sea.

*

Stan Sanvel Rubin has poems recently in 2 River, Sheila-na-gig and Aji and has been previously published in Agni, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, One and others. His four full collections include There. Here (Lost Horse Press) and Hidden Sequel (Barrow Street Book Prize). He lives on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. He writes essay reviews of poetry for Water-Stone Review.