I pass by old lovers on my way to you

[Kailashana]

The street is not a delicacy,
tires crunch the rain turned to ice,
you in China, guarded by poets
and lions, I wonder who you hold in
your arms, I know she is kind, I remember
weeping in your ecstatic embrace, our minds
coming together in theatrical experiments;

you in a grave in Munich, kale growing
in the summer and my sorrow following you,
digging up your bones in old ceremonies of worship,
you that plundered the silence by dying, I was not
ready to bid you farewell, sighing deep rivers
I have yet to cross like a riderless horse, grazing
the opalescent moon;

you scattered near an orange tree in Southern
California, your sitar stilled but still echoing, my favourite
poem nearly memorized--your absence, my friend,
once again teaching the suddenness of things, how
fate is like sexual foreplay and we're always caught in its
final act;

you in Ohio,
taking pictures and writing three or four-lines
that speak with your eyes, you an obsession, you a scar
that has finally healed, you a poem I fell in love with,
when I could not speak of indifference.

I have loved you all, in some of the same ways, in
ways that are the sum of time and distance, of water falling
over and smoothing the stories of stones, evaporating into clouds and doubt,
into pretense and
rain absolving all ground,
tending the orchards of graves and bedrooms.

The sound of ice cracking and melting in my mouth.


~A

[dadio]

Splendid poem, Anna.