Poems with Personification

My father's chair still faces the window where he watched the street as if expecting a delivery that never quite arrived. The leather has his shape in it— that specific lean to the left where his hip gave trouble, the arms worn pale where he rested his hands each evening at six fifteen, precise as a churchbell nobody asked to ring. I sat in it once, after. It was like wearing his coat: too large, still warm with the ghost of a size I will never fill. My mother hasn't moved it. She dusts around it the way the sea goes around a rock— not avoiding it, exactly. Just acknowledging that some things have earned the right to be where they are.

The house at three a.m. becomes a throat that hums with all the things we didn't say, and I lie still as someone in a boat that drifts because the anchor slipped away. I hear the pipes, the settling of the beams, the fridge's hum, that small electric prayer. My mind lays out its deck of ruined dreams and plays them one by one with patient care. I've tried the cures: warm milk, slow breath, the drone of podcasts preaching rest to restless men, but sleep's a cat—it comes when left alone and vanishes the moment you say when. So I surrender. Three a.m., be mine. I'll take the dark. The dark can take its time.

The earth is trying something underneath— you feel it in the softness of the ground, a stirring, like a sleeper holding breath before the alarm, before the coming sound. The willow bends but hasn't leafed. The air tastes almost green although the branches wait. A blackbird tests one note against the bare grey sky as if to ask the world: how late? I too have wintered, held my breath through cold and shortened days that tasted like the dark, have watched the calendar like something old and useless—then: one morning. One small lark. And here it comes. The crocus splits the ground. I kneel. I press my ear. I hear the sound.