Gather

When you are older, does distance always feel like nostalgia or does it change?
Does it feel different to say I have been distant from you for X number of months
or years, or you stopped speaking to me X months ago and I don't exactly know 
why anymore; from saying I miss the sound of you opening drawers in the next 
room, turning on the shower, flushing the toilet, running down that hall and calling
I'll be back after lunch; running back in again asking what's for dinner? In the library, 
students are writing papers on the poetics of trauma or the poetics of dispossession. 
Late autumn sun streams in through the high windows, making a bright quilt out 
of sections of old grey carpeting. Near the elementary school, in someone's yard,
there's a persimmon tree studded with fruit. They are almost the same shade 
as ginkgo leaves fallen in heaps on the sidewalks. Gather is a thing you can do
with your hands.

Everything seems either so fleshy or so like a wing.