Moon rides in just over the crest
of Creed Mountain and our words
tremble in a sudden wind as the pines
unlock their arms and remind of
all the lost years.
We made love here in our youth,
discarded self after self to reach
the single one each to each,
hours falling away like used up
rayons when the picture
says finished.
If there was a future to be met
we didn’t see it, not then
daylight or dark rain or
sun.
Only the pulse of the moment
holding us as a mother might
her brief children, warmth
and breath all that matters.
Now we wander here with eyes
wary, unspoken thoughts casting
ahead for what this year, any year,
might bring.
We have stored up decades of words
carved in a somewhat brittle grammar
and now as we speak their echoes
seem as distant as ancient hooves
on the far-off prairie.
Even so.
Love, I hear you say, it is a child
of time, both anchor in an unyielding sea
and the ship taking us far out
no return.

Your poems have arrived. Sea
gulls wheeling toward shore
messages swarming
everywhere.

I ask you how a single poem
can take the whole earth
in its palm,

even time gathering there
in its silent wings.

How is it you left the Bay
of Biscay and didn’t send me
the news of death.

Uncle Samuel shriveled and
pale in his Bordeaux
apartment near the quai.

I ask if you witnessed his
last words and captured them
in a poem that can strike
through stone and make
a radiance out of
the dark.