Absence
by
Roger Pfingston
My
wife and I miss Carole,
our
next-door neighbor,
and
Elmer, also our neighbor
who
lived across the road.
Elmer
for his daily banter,
a
mechanical wizard with mowers
and
such, a sharp-eyed nonagenarian
who
roamed his yard, hose in hand,
flushing
the tunneled darkness
of
moles uprooting his grass.
Carole
for her resolve against
cancer
while tending myriad
flowers,
her front yard
the
plotted absence of grass.
So
recent their going,
sometimes
we pick up the phone
or
glance out the window
before
we catch ourselves.
A
retired teacher of English and photography, Roger
Pfingston is
the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts and two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. He is
the author of Something Iridescent, a collection of poetry and
fiction, as well as four chapbooks: Earthbound,
Singing
to the Garden,
A
Day Marked for Telling,
and What’s
Given,
the latter recently published by Kattywompus Press.