The Second Shelf

There's a word for the way your coffee cup still sits on the second shelf where no one else would put it— not the top, not the bottom—that middle distance where everything you touched still holds the shape of your deciding. I've learned a new language this year: the grammar of a coat still hanging by the door, the syntax of a dent in the other pillow. The cat still goes to your side of the bed. The floorboard near the bathroom still creaks at your weight though you have taken your weight to another town, another bed, another floorboard that will learn you. I keep the cup on the second shelf. Not because I'm waiting. Because my hands go there the way birds return to a tree that has been cut down— circling the air where it was, confused by so much sky.