ON THE NTH ANNIVERSARY OF YOUR DEATH

The first time I got a smartphone, it was mostly to text with a woman I’d just met, who slept shirtless in my bed, cyclically, before years of silence and who, a decade later, would become my wife beneath an oak tree in our backyard. She gifted me a Japanese maple that day. When you met her, you spoke like a child and the only thing you could ask was whether we were planning for children. What did it matter to you then, tethered to machines. You don’t visit. I have no dreams though once, an estranged friend called to report one: mute, no color but your eyes, blue as ice that holds shape in water. I am jealous. I use present tense. You can’t visit. My wife looks stricken when I unbox my grief, knowing there was never anything she could do, and even less now it’s been long enough you’ve lost your meat, could have skeletonized six times over. I don’t know what I was trying to type the other day, but the phone autocorrected to read Dad, undying, comma and all. If I believed in signs, I would invent one.