for my ex, on her birthday*

I have rarely written of it;
I barely think of it.

Now, ten years separate us.

But your heart can not skip
lightly away from thirty years.

When I do remember it punches
me hard in the solar plexus,
like the scenes from that
long ago and far away war.

It took the wind out of my sails;
a chunk out of my life;
more than a little piece of my heart...

so many cliches and all so true.

We have moved on,
as another cliche goes.

It is not the wife I miss,
but the very human person
and the life we made together.

Thirty years does not make
a life sentence, but a long one.

What you think will be
and what becomes,
conjoin and diverge.

Love is like the daily weather;
it arrives and then it departs.

Some storms cannot be survived,
but nothing is really ever lost.

   ~mce