My husband is away again this week, and while I like the time alone, I miss coming home from work and having someone there other than the cat with whom to share my day. And of course I miss his physical presence, that comforting power of touch.

A brief digression: A couple of summers ago I spent a week at an artist/writer retreat on Great Spruce Head Island, an island in eastern Penobscot Bay that has been owned for several generations by the Porter family (as in, photographer Eliot and painter Fairfield). We stayed in Fairfield Porter's house, ate gourmet, organic food, and did whatever we wanted with our time. I napped, read, and roamed the island, watching birds and writing notes and some mediocre poems about the incredible landscape: fog, sea birds, stony beaches, dense spruce forests carpeted with moss and lichen, the sound of the waves, sunny meadows where deer graze. But in the end what I felt really inspired to write were haiku. And interestingly, some of my most successful ones were sensual "love notes" to my husband, whom I was missing. For our last night's "show," while all the artists (there were nine artists and two writers) arranged and hung their paintings, pastels and drawings for display, I paired some of the haiku I had written with appropriate natural objects and created a tactile poetry/object to create an interactive exhibit of sorts. This is one of the haiku I wrote for my husband, written on a piece of paper roughly torn into the shape of a heart and stuck to a heart-shaped stone I found on one of the island beaches:

If I were going to similarly display the following haiku with an object, it would be the necklace I was wearing of big, chunky green and yellow stones interspersed with carved wooden beads. When I got undressed last night, I was surprised to feel how hot the beads were from being in contact all day with my skin. The sensuality of that realization made me miss my husband.

Home alone tonight.

Unclasped necklace in my hand,

wooden beads still warm.