Breathing in, you can’t go deep enough.
If you drilled through the ocean, through the sandy bottom,
through the liquid rock at the core of the Earth,
it wouldn’t be deep enough.
Breathing out, you can’t spread wide enough.
You could fill each stunned corner
of your dusty house with sighs,
but it wouldn’t be wide enough.
You could never sleep so still,
lie so quietly,
ignore so much
that it would change the facts.
That’s how it felt
when the bad news hit.
All I could do was get back to the business at hand –
sleeping, loving, breathing in and out.
