The hairs she shed while brushing
punctuated the sink
with undotted question marks,
open parentheses,
commas and unclosed quotations,
every day a scattering
of signs shaken from the sentences
she never spoke to him,
words whose ghost was that oval

of chilly porcelain
where he gathers up the final issue
of filament-fragments
from her head, a feathery swirl
of dark curved strokes
he releases from pinched fingers
over the bathroom trash,
watching it fall as if in slow motion,
a shadow-nest of scribbles.