I guess you could call it
a sort of sympathetic magic.
How else to explain
this obsessive reorganizing
of my home, my books, my papers,
my poems, this housekeeping
of my hard drive and floppies,
all the deleting and casting away
of redundancy and obsolescence,
dead files and moved-on addresses
and the scrubbing, the constant
scrubbing and dusting and the howl
of the protesting vacuum
that struggles to inhale
at least the 70% of house-dust
that is dead human skin
some of which might be hers.