On the Other Side Of An Hour
by Amber McMillan
Let’s say you had known then what you know now:
on that morning you came to visit your friend at home,
even when you knocked on his door, let’s say you’d known
when you entered his room that he would already be gone:
let’s say you held a mess of wildflowers in your arms;
you had brought the blooms to improve the atmosphere,
to lay them along his quiet body and in so doing draw
communion to him and the slow opening of stained petals
spread along his forearm and stretching to his bare shoulder
where you imagined he would have placed them himself.
Let’s say instead of losing, or held at bay as you were,
you had traced the loose map he kept guarded in his mind,
a private reckoning that laced, like stars, a to b to c—let’s say
you had seen it all so clearly it was as if you understood:
the end, the beginning, love, the cockeyed cedar tree.
Amber McMillan is the author of The Woods: A Year on Protection Island (2016) and the poetry collection We Can’t Ever Do This Again (2015). Her work has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, PRISM international, Best Canadian Poetry, The Walrus and others across North America. She lives and works on BC’s Sunshine Coast.