My wishes are dreary and cold
Time, in rush, under the sun is sweating,
And summer sears stories can’t be told,
The heart by itself is obliged to live beating,
In cadence with love words of a song,
Which a pretty girl sang so long, so long.
I sighed, then, and sympathized with her pain,
Later, to recollect those words, I tried in vain.
Her eyes were intense black, sad and wet.
Where starless winter night wove his web,
A desire rose , then in my solitude, I wept.
At that moment I loved, yet couldn’t speak;
Now she is a misty shade at its lowest ebb,
My fondness remains, upon my chest creeps.
Salty rain drops, in the eye, trickle down the cheek.
   While the heart, with nettling remorse, weeps.

"Thirty plus years in a
loving happy marriage,
My husband taken
by long illness
and sad ending.

Five years companionless
loneliness endured,
Now a naked man
is in my shower,
I can hear him softly
singing."

Love and companionship
can come at any age.
Rendering you both
whole and renewed again.

I lost my first
wedding ring
that summer

we floated
on inner tubes
coupled together,
drinking ice-cold
beer in the sun.

A flash of gold
and it was gone.

I lost the boots
my father wore
in Vietnam.

I lost the first
pocketknife
I ever owned.

I lost my mother.

I lost my way
in college once,
watching heavy snow
smother the foothills
and switchbacks,
watching mountain
birds turn wide circles
above rough canyons.

I lost track of time but
found my father’s gun.

Winter will always
sound like the whir
of a cylinder spun in
an unfurnished room.

Where the river abandons herself to the creek
and the mudbank is cratered with crabclaws
waits the old man.

He doesn't know his years
but his ears are a sonic gift
catching the tonal variations of tides
seemingly for eons
evolving with the mangrove map
into a flawless tracker
of how far the moon would recline
for ***** to be holed out
and what shoreline the water would touch
before the shrimps starlight driven
make a beeline for the net.

I encountered him once
in the absurdity of a time
when I was high
and he lowly crouching
was making art by the creek.

Who was the poet
I could never tell.