Absences

“Even when you are not in a room, you are in it, your voice everywhere.” –Bill Holm “Even when you are not in a room, you are in it, your voice everywhere.”–Bill Holm The message that’s recorded on the phone is unmistakably bad news, and then another call tells us it’s one we love— a sudden death while traveling, somehow appropriate for one who always seized life too completely to stand still. A door slams shut, a wall has dropped away, and once again I’m driven back to empty pages, insufficient words, to rooms he always filled on entering— rooms lined with books, piano music, and good friends who raise their glasses one last time. And now, as all the lights are blinking off in every prairie town we’ve ever loved, when all the toasts are made and songs are sung, when leaving is the only certainty, a single voice keeps echoing, along each dark, untraveled hallway of the heart.