How will it all end?
Like ice in sherbet,
Cubes of daylight melting
Into the rose crush of sunset?
 
Or in the wink of an eye
Which refuses to shut
When expected to die,
Blinking instead with a sigh?
 
Life doesn’t gather, as one knows
Into neat endings
Like those in stories
But sometimes continues after the end,
 
Plodding on without a clue,
Its protagonists wander
Beyond the plot
In a perennial postscript.
                        

He always knew
When she crept into herself,
That sudden retreat into silence
Without any words having been said
Or exchanges traded.
 
A deep and deafening silence
Like that buried beneath layers
Of lost civilizations, the lingering,
Hovering echoes of the ages, 
Which crystallize into a domestic dirge.
 
The music of the house
Took up the cue
And wove its subtle symphony, 
Capturing through its dissonant riffs
The minutiae of their misery.
 
The brisk drawing of the curtains,
The click of a spectacles case shut,
Decisive scraping of a chair put back,
Smart rustle of a newspaper settling
Into brittle bytes of blankness.
 
The dismissive click of a cup
Set back on its saucer, 
That sound of a door being shut, somewhere,
All these and more
Tell their story of endings,
 
Not necessarily closures,
But mechanical measures
Of withdrawals in wintry woods
Down the bends of mossy roads
And lonely, cobbled corners.
 
No sounds, save
The plaintive percussions 
Of a relationship on hold,
Till the signals come on again
Amidst the crackling static of the lines.