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60 the widows’ handbook Counterpoise Carol Tufts I wish I could still feel you gave a damn, lurking like a voyeur, never deigning to drop a clue, not even when I try to draw you out with a dumb show, or a straight line. This is one of those fundamentals that takes longer for me than most to master, like the way numbers ascend on a clock to add up to sixty, or no matter how you face it, the needle on a compass trembles, always stopping to point due north. The fact is you dead never return, not ever with the serendipity of spare change and lost dogs. And I do hold forth until I am blue in the face, exhuming consolation, burrowing in to hollow out a channel to float you back through the unmapped latitudes of my grief, even as the ratcheting days wash over your traces and the nestled press of your limbs against mine gives way to the cat caressing the space where you lingered, a phantom who would refract the darkness, a breathless whisper to raise me up to that frequency I cannot sound, perfect though I may be, tuned to its pitch. ...

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