The Word for That Light

I called to say happy birthday, she said hello,

and for twenty minutes I held my ground—

the diminutives, the formal endings,

the old grammar I'd learned by sound.

Then I reached for the word. The one

for how late afternoon light sits in a room,

that specific yellow, the particular weight

of it—not a metaphor, not a perfume,

just a word. A word I've known

since I was four, since the apartment

where the windows faced west and it came in

like that every evening, patient

and thick and unnamed in English.

My mouth made the shape and found it gone.

I said something else. She accepted it.

She asked about my job. We moved on.

But I stayed there a second longer

than she knew—at the gap between

what I meant and what I managed,

the sentence and what it could have been.