Your footsteps
through our garden's deepest snow
end abruptly,

as if you had vanished to a flake,
your atoms rearranged
to crystal. Strange, that the life

of perfect symmetry you sought
would come to this:
your measured motion forward

subsumed by the angles and planes
of drift, each step that marks
your absence advancing

a theory of chaos. How could you
disappear this way?
Our stone bench, so lean in summer,

now pushing up on padded haunches,
Hawthorn tree twisting
towards the impression you left--

like them, I have nearly split in two,
straining to erase
the souvenirs of your passing.

"Drifts," Poetry, May 1997, copyright Modern Poetry Association