Time travel to Dallas days. We were sitting in your Acura Legend. Your face veiled, my eyes watery from the smoke, I know I hate tobacco now.
"Tom, teach me how to write poems, like yours."
"Okay but tell me first, Katie.
What are you running away from?"

We were close to home,
just sound without meaning,
a kid’s drawing on the refrigerator.
So the answer never differs:
I’m not running away, I’m running towards.

I don't remember, do you,
when poetry turned into dictionaries of devotion.
It was the language of tenderness you taught me,
my extinct mother tongue.
To love the ordinary was suddenly easy.

Those memories
                  the warmth of you
make it hard to imagine
that you are buried
somewhere in Iowa.

Here, read my dictionaries now:
page after page,
in hundred variations:
„Please come back to me“
and
„I will always long to bargain your soul for mine.“

That little toy airplane, the one you gave me
when we were kids,
still stands on my nightstand.
This time it is my turn to teach,
teach you about the cruelty of freedom.

Each rose I met promised to explain me
the wonder, the joy
of transformation.
The perennial grief,
at the sight of the world becoming,
is the grief of wanting to understand but not being able to.
How much greed there was,
in my longing for a garden.