Let us speak of love and weather
Subtracting nothing.
Let us put your mother and my father
Your father and my mother,
Away for a while.
Let us watch
From our bedroom window how a slow
Falling snow crowns
All nakedness in ermine.
Do not look at me yet. My face is flushed,
Your eyes too love-soaked, too hazel.
Outside is white on black
And still…..
The sky, deaf with stillness.
Don’t let it frighten you.
Hush. There’s time enough for that.
Be content for now to watch the maples
Fill with snow, how they spread themselves,
Each naked limb making itself accessible.
I loved you then in the old way of longing.
Another winter trying to duplicate ours.
Do you still long for me? The rest all is gibberish.
I recognize or recall—the old hollows, the way our flesh must have waked and curved to each other,
how sinews of your shoulder were attached to carve out
the place I lay my head.
This is about....
what happens to what you can’t remember
because the mind’s job is to save your life—
cauterizing, cutting it out.
What’s gone is forced to wander
the brain looking for the warm spot,
the open-arms, embrace where it used to live.
Dropping echoes like desperate pebbles in
their wake, having nothing but a voiceless
tongue of dried leather, all frenzy and wag.
All given to sadness amid great stirrings,
for you were rocked to sleep in the knowledge
of loss and saw in the reflection outside your window,
beyond the bars of your reach,
your own face beckoning from the burning promise that
Little by little disappeared.
What can I give you
for your birthday this year,
you who are the match and the flaming jewel,
whose birthright consumes itself
in the face of your desire?
If you were here with me now
walking down this day’s death,
I would try to show you two things:
How the last light plays itself out over the horizon,
over the wild cherry heavy with fruit,
as if comfort lay in what it had made.
And how that black bird
with flame at his shoulders
teeters for balance on a swaying weed.
When I sleep at night I think of you,
.jpg)
