oh wow. nine days. or eight, depends on how you look at it.

august is the end of all things.

joy in the day's being done, however
clumsily, and in the ticked-off lists,
the packages nestling together,
no one home waiting for dinner, for
you, no one impatient for your touch
or kind words to salve what nightly
rises like heartburn, the ghost-lump feeling
that one is really as alone as one had feared.
One isn't, not really. Not really.

J. Allyn Rosser, "Then too there is this"