Category: Love
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Old elm (revised)
Abandoned farmhouse, graying outbuildings. In your final winter, you stood with empty, cracking branches to tell us plain that your kind shade would be gone – My father, too, would warn us so in his gruffled, dying voice to give us time to account, to record, to not be frightened. Empty sky. Time unwinds. I…
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Finding things lost
I no longer trust myself having searched all morning for the missing piece in our endless jigsaw and come up empty-handed – then to find it with a quick glance as I poured more coffee. You ask where I left my heart – out on the porch after dinner or somewhere on the lake bluff?…
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In ordinary time
Dust stirs as I walk to your door, hat by my side. Long pond lies still, weeds bending, expectant. How many steps like this in how many galaxies on earth unrecounted? They come, they go, dust tumbles round footprints, shuffling in and out, as if deciding what shall be be.
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Buddhista 3
It is a miracle that you survive day after long day in the cold, under rain, through whining wind. Once, as snow fell, a smirk edged your lips but it slipped under by the time I looked firm. I ask, are you a ghost? Yet day after long day, you hold steady, build moment after…
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What love could learn from fungus if it would only listen
I wish you could spread in that restless, vindictive, ambling way — to not be held back, to spew spores whenever someone tries to uproot you, sloppy, lazy enough to reproduce anywhere. How I wish you did. It would all be so much easier if you did. ——— Something along the lines of Hafiz.
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In the middle of the night
How you pull me down and up at once. In you I see ancient, raw days when I brought something polished and fine and you, face down, eyes darting, question my sincerity which I prove again and again, for now.
Poems from in between 