
love is all at once very complicated,
and very simple
love is all at once very complicated,
and very simple
there is a piece of my heart
that always and forever
leads me right back to
you
sometimes the details of life make it hard to breathe,
make it so that my heart feels squeezed and i tell myself to keep it together–
often i feel foolish because it isn’t over heroic acts or poetic words
it isn’t intense emotions over politics or rhetoric or what’s right or what’s wrong with the world–
it’s about a robin eating berries in the snow (why didn’t he migrate?)
and a detail in the railing that made me look twice,
it’s when a man holds his wife’s hand gently and absentmindedly caresses her arm,
it’s the 1968 photo where faces beam with hope and happiness,
and how his goodbye was a little hurried, like ripping off a band-aid and shaking off the sting
Indifference can make you feel small, it can render you invisible, as you question the tender essence of yourself and the preservation of what used to be your young and wild spirit.
you were then, the age i am now–
i think about this in the dark and
scoop your image from my memory–
your young children will be grown,
your hair, fully silver–
of course when i meet you in my dream later that night,
we are as we were–
and i am desired once again
afternoon winter skies
atlas jars
small aquamarine on a silver chain
a plastic bottlecap in the woods
and the memory of your tender blue eyes
she was different then,
and he was different when
they were friends
the years roll on,
one in front of the other,
and i wonder
if you still smoke those short cigarettes
and close your eyes gently with the first hit of dark spanish tobacco,
if you paint at an open sea-facing window,
if you drink your coffee sweet and midnight black,
if you ever,
do you ever,
let yourself remember…
what if we looked at one another with peace
and with friendship
and with gratitude
and with empathy
and with kindness
what would the world look like then?
with them,
i remember who i am