I Had Just Hung Up from Talking to You

I had just hung up from talking to you and we had been so immersed in the difficulty you were facing, and forgive me, I was thinking that as long as we kept talking, you in your car in the parking lot of the boys’ school as the afternoon deepened into early evening, and me in the study, all the books around that had been sources of beauty to us, as long as we stayed in the conversation padded with history like the floor of the pine forest, as long as I thought out loud, made a joke at my own expense, you would be harbored in that exchange, but the boys were leaving the track and after we hung up I looked out the window to see the top of the bare January trees spotlit to silvery red, massive but made from the thinnest twigs at the ends of the branches at the ends of the limbs they were waving and shining in a light like no other and left only to them.