The Unfinished Crossword
Folded in quarters on the nightstand,
pencil tucked inside the crease.
Fourteen across: a seven-letter word
for the opposite of peace.
He had gotten twelve of them. The rest
were blank, the grid half-dark, half-white,
a mind interrupted mid-solution,
a brain switched off mid-fight
with a clue that would have come to him
by morning, would have surfaced
in the shower or the truck,
the answer rising to the surface
the way they always did for him—
delayed but guaranteed, a slow-fuse man
who never rushed a puzzle or a meal
or a handshake or a plan.
Fourteen across is still unanswered.
The pencil is going dull.
And I have tried to finish it for him
but my head is too thick, too full
of the wrong kind of knowing—
I know the weight of the casket lid,
I know the cost of the burial plot,
I know exactly what he did
on his last good day of living,
but I cannot solve fourteen across
and the not-knowing is a splinter
driven sideways through the loss.
The newspaper is yellowing.
The date on top reads like a scar—
the last morning he sat upright,
the last time he got that far
into the ritual: coffee, toast,
the crossword spread across his knee,
the pencil sharpened with a knife
the way his father taught, debris
of graphite curled on the blanket
like the shavings from a life
pared down to its essentials:
a word, a clue, a pencil and a wife
who slept beside him while he worked
the grid in silence, every dawn,
who did not know the morning that she woke
and found the crossword and the man both gone.
I keep it in the nightstand drawer.
Folded the same way, pencil tucked.
I have bought the same paper every day since then
and worked the crossword, dumb and stuck
on half the clues the way I always was—
he was the clever one, the quick,
the mind that bent around a problem
like a river bends past brick—
and I leave fourteen across blank
in every single one I do,
a white square held in perpetuity,
an unsolved space for what I never knew
and what he never got to tell me
and what the silence keeps instead:
a seven-letter word for the opposite of peace.
I think the answer might be buried.
I think the answer might be ceased.