Peripheral

At some point

the unsaid words outnumbered the spoken

the way a photograph disappears

when you zoom in too far.

I notice them

in the space after names —

my mother's,

the first boy I slept with,

the widowed woman at the pharmacy.

The language arrives,

open mouths.

Then intervention.

Years.

Decades.

On an afternoon a bird lifts from the roadside

briefly the air is crowded.

Without metaphor.

As if the world has been storing everything we declined to place in it.

All day

I feel them gathering —

behind the shoulder,

at the edge of hearing.

Not asking to be spoken —

past that now.

Wanting

to remain.

And they do.

The unsaid survives astonishingly well.