(for Peggy, with Alzheimer’s, 1996)*

Absent spirit:
Soothe our hunger for consolation
In the presence of this woman
Who asks for none.

May the colored shapes we have become
Stand apart from these walls--
Where sun after sun has tiled
A catacomb of days--
Distinctly enough to radiate our love.

Banish our loss.
Dissolve the bitter mystery of why.
Forgive our numb embrace
That enfolds this slumping body
Whose eyes reflect glass,
Whose mind quests beyond a dark door
Searching for a land of lost names.

Give words to her passage.
Resolve the twisted path she must follow alone,
The cratered wastes she calls across,
Seeking a land of kindred beings with cognate powers
That name her as their own and exult.

the sea in ribbons,
blue lands of the tide,
surreal as summer
with her plastic suns,
her moons of smoke,
her endless rivers.

Innocence is the days when
I thought that monsters
lived under the bed rather
than slept right beside me.

It was the times I feared
heights almost as much as
I now fear brooding stares.

Back when I thought
passionate love was the
only kind worth having
— that I now wish for a
lover who loves quietly.

Innocence was thinking
danger was an ill-advised
adventure, not a man.

It was admiring a tornado
heart and not realizing the
damage it would cause.

As this thought was infecting my heart
'I wont want to go, but it will be time to leave
He will be in my heart, forever with me'
I crawled to the only man I will ever love again
Him in a drunken slumber oblivious to the world

This whisper is the lightest, calmest, thing I've ever spoken
Over and over, on and on, "I love you so much"
The quietest thing you have never heard
So lightly spoken that not even God could hear
But this inaudible love was heard by two persons
And two persons only, and he whispered back
"I love you" and I knew no one else could ever hear