Last Observation Carried Forward

You walked out of the bungalow last February
when the mist imitated every shade of gray
and the hemlocks held their green.

You are gone. Still, I am bound
to keep you, bent over, packing, at the door. Forever.
To carry your last pulse, your last tremor,
forward through the blossoming to come,
frozen in that posture of your exit—
an anomaly in the database
while the real you fractures into counterfactual.

I impute your silence, your missingness.
I calculate the story you should be
from the ghosts of our last visits.

Accuse me of being too frequentist,
clinging to cold certainty.
You, now a test subject,
your data locked.

Error accumulated.
Model drifted.
Signal degraded.

Stress-test the fictions.
Sensitivity Analysis.

What if you didn’t not change?
What if you—

What if—

Through a breakpoint analysis
we learn
how much of a liar I have to be—
how significant we might have been.

Our breath clouding in cold air

vanishing.

Kent Koprowicz is a poet and biostatistician in Seattle, Washington, where he leads statistical work supporting data monitoring committees for late-stage clinical trials. His poems draw on the vocabulary of clinical research—survival curves, censored observations, error—to write about grief, intimacy, and perception. He has studied at Hugo House and read in its Works in Progress series.