More Then Than Now

I was going through pictures of everyone.  Five years and six years ago when there were fewer wrinkles and more food on the children's faces.  Few toothed baby smiles and running around without any pants on.  Piles of blankets for toddler and baby to pretend to read side by side.  Our old house, the two rooms full of sun and cracker crumbs, and some pictures of him on the couch, ripped green shirt on maroon couch and a smile that makes me eat gulps of some nameless feeling that feels like falling down.  I keep thinking of the kitchen floor where there were deep gaps between the slats of flooring.  I could never get that floor all the way clean.  Even when I bothered to try.  I used to like to sweep it and mop it.  I liked to have the back door open on that big sloping yard and how it sounded when he came home.  There is no place for the picture now.  Sealed in a screen, a big quiet stretch, the still of the dead.  I can barely animate him in my memory or remember the kisses the whispers of promise.  I can barely make it mean anything now.  It maybe never did.  I don't know when that is supposed to stop gutting me.  Maybe when I stop thinking of it, I guess.  I get tired thinking of him, in his new life moving on and what I become in the undertow, the disintegration.  Eaten by the waves he makes moving away.