The Gift of One Time

There is a companion of my work – one to whom I am married at the center. We work unseen, like the moment a dove loses a feather or the long, slow migration of desert sand. Blank pages are my open arms but the words . . . they are my lover's. We rend a heart that is fully realized and yet. And yet. We can only barely speak of one another. When I write deeply enough, I find our possibility. I hear what was never said. I understand that which amplifies this telling. This should be a poem, but instead it is a manifesto.

We had a gift of one time. Nothing more was promised and so, nothing more exists. Except the writing.

*

After the bonfire cooled, I let my head my head fall into the back of the camp chair. The moon moved with hunger through windows of pine. The dog curls at my feet and in these moments, everything that resists or encumbers, completely retreats into the darkness. Distance collapses and touchable nearness begins to undress.

We never made dawn together, but there is yet something tangible existing under this vaulted, black sky.

*

Springtime urges me fall in love with possibility. It causes me to walk at nighttime while others sleep under moonlit sheets. It calls me to sit by fires and make offerings to ancestors. I write lyrics for pine song and swim before the gaze of blue hills. What is temporary stands as a noble profile, but in the light of May, what is enduring becomes so very clear.