She’ll wander back to you again,
but drawn by the string
of ineffable instinct—kissing the sand
of your beaches still damp
by the routine of her departure.
Yet as she recedes,
you already ache her homecoming
as though longing for an estranged relative.

You count the years
by the bitterest point
of every winter, and
value your harvests
against the cruelty of the drought—
and even when she rearranges herself
nightly, by increments you’ve already calculated
by meticulous observation,
somehow good fortune owes you eternity,
even as it crumbles under the weight
of its own impermanence.

You’ve never dealt well with entropy;
all that came before you, which also happens
to survive you—an honorary god.
Stranded on earth,
you monitor your greying scalp as grimly
as you decry a darkening sky above you succumbing
to the certainty of winter, but
even she is ebbing, too.
You curse her departure like an abandoned child,
but she had never sinned against you—
that was your idea.

You mourn the day she repossesses
with mortal anguish,
yet you still find a way to forgive her
when she sends Dawn
to shine his light between the trees.