Like a gull,
you migrate northward in the spring,
and return to my life
after months,
fluttering.
But something in your distance,
and the words you use to break it,
silence me,
and the space that once enlarged
turns harsher, less tender,
tightening,
and the union, censorial, forbidding,
as flattening as the winter
you flung,
as stiffened by the unspoken,
which burns
like ice on tongue.