Forty years before
this brokenness,
before bed-riddenness
exchanged longing
for servitude,
before the silent
midsummers on porches,
where you became monuments,
to time’s slowing and speeding,
the coming on of that evening
light in august,
before knowing all that its passing
will take away,
the crabapple bloomed
white the spring of ’74,
forsythia bursting
yellow on the hill,
green ground and wood
tugging at our guts even then,
pulling down,
swelling and pregnant,
memory digging in,
root, and leaf, and sky, turning
toward words
we would never end up saying,
always turning toward
the empty winter of now,
when cardinals croon in the pines,
chickadees burrow in the yews,
bare-branched maple and locust thatch
against gray November skies
and the light in the back woods,
falls finally in morning,
silvering the frosted grass,
and later in evening,
lays the pine shadows out
long across the east field
by the empty house
where no eyes or voice or body,
or even memory
is left to bear witness.
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