It's Still Life

The Unraveling Atlas

All of it vanished.

An atlas of her mind,
its cities and borders,
quietly disowned by its own map.

She tries, but my name
is a syllable without a home,

a drift of familiar music
that slips off the edge of the world
every time I leave.
Or finish a sentence.

I learn to search her forgetting.
To check the dusty corner,
her river’s blank murmur,
her road that leads only to stones.

She is in the present,
digging fresh ruins
of a moment just passed.

This new, silent geography
is the landscape of her gaze,
where I am both beloved
and beautifully, terribly unknown.

But I am not lost to her;
I am simply part of the weather in her sky —
felt, but not named.

Happy birthday, Lene.

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Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI. Poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2026.