The specific weight of the last night of the week—
I’ve had this since the schoolyard, since the bleak
last hours of the two-day break,
the light going different as the dusk would take
the afternoon. The house goes quiet
in a different way—the subtle riot
of the particular grey of the seventh evening,
the couch, the program, the slow grieving.
It is not the dread exactly, not the fright
of what approaches, more the texture
of the end of the break, the composite lecture
of the week reasserting. I’ve had this weight
since childhood, same quiet gate
of the grey that opens in the early dark—
the specific sadness: decades, still the mark.
The television is different. Even the watching
has a different quality, the notching
of the hours toward the end of the rest.
These same three hours bear the manifest
weight they lack on other evenings.
I know this feeling by its meetings—
the quiet house, the light gone amber,
the particular grey that fills the chamber
of the week’s last hours. I’ve catalogued the feeling
across decades—same weight, different ceiling,
same quiet pressure, different address.
I don’t fight it anymore. The mess
of the anticipation has its place—
the grief is small, familiar, it has a face
I recognize. I let it have its hour.
The week’s last night: mine. The grey: my tower.