There is no need to
remember anything, except
the way I looked at you in
the beginning;
overlapping palm fronds
were enough to call you
a jungle, or so it once felt,
as I’d not seen them before;
and the way water and opportunity
presented as plentiful, what with
coastline drawing near,
turning its edges over and under
its blue figure fused, somehow
and so many years still ready to
enter annually, bittersweetly
waving me in, saying
‘that one is gone, but
there will still be time.’

Time for travel
Time for adoration of each other
Time for two cups of tea before
the sun bleaches morning,
stripping what I have always viewed as
dawn’s quiet holiness from the air,
achieving this by way of my one
south-facing kitchen window.
Then it becomes time to face the day.

Later–not today–it will come time to ask
of adventures and lovers
‘is it all in the past?’
When the trees begin to look
more brittle, more browned
than once they appeared;
when ocean moves so repetitiously
we hardly notice what a gift
it is to see
and subtly
be pulled by the tides.
We will know the answer to this–
‘is it all in the past?’
–only at an end that does not
in so many cases
announce itself.
Best to believe, until that time, no.
Best to see signs even if
signs do not exist;
even if hope is only written
on the spine of a book,
tempting searching hands
to pull it from the shelf and
consider its contents potentially pleasurable,
possibly vivid
like the ocean has been,
whether I say so or not,
so long as it is still tumbling