After Everything That Has Happened

Another poem that I wrote and posted in March of 2006.


After Everything That Has Happened
by Kevin Cahill

I think I am awake
alone when I hear her heels
drum along the floor.
I fold up the newspaper
I look instead into her eyes -
it could be anything -
what, I wonder, is going
to be today?
last night I didn’t dream, she says.
in silence
I wonder, what it is
she hadn’t dreamt of

she clambers up
takes a pen and
starts to draw
sometimes in the narrow
white margins
and sometimes over the words
over the headlines
over the captions
and over the photos
over everything that
has already happened
she seems to watch her
own hand as if it were
a potato bug crawling across
the floor. I think,
what are you dreaming now?

after a while
I ease out from under
her bare knees,
I slip into
the kitchen,
someone should make
breakfast,
she’ll be hungry
when she wakes up.

3/13/2006