That thing you gave me—
I have it still
all these years later.
I found it the other day,
half-hidden, like a folded sweater
in a forgotten trunk.

You were young then,
lovely, haggard
like an orchid softly wilting
in unforgiving heat.
Wasting amazon,
pain deep within your legs,
resting like a queen
on a stone sarcophagus.

When the boy read to you,
did you hear his stumbling words,
from the frayed blue book?
Or was your troubled mind
wandering elsewhere,
on some trackless, stubbled field?

He felt only the touch of your hand
on his hair, the warm pulse of your breath
on his forehead and eyelashes.

In the church balcony:
Water Music.
Fingers stretched above the keys,
pipe ***** bright and sonorous.
Down below, the congregants
gazed upon the pulpit
awaiting the benediction.
Soul souring,
heart filling.
God was great.

Shimmering like Artemis in her glade,
you stood reflected in a mirror
on the closet door,
gowned in emerald satin—
a last look at makeup
before he calls upstairs
that the car is ready.

You smiled
as you turned to go,
fabric swishing against your legs.
Uncertain memory insists you smiled,
if only momentarily to unclench
the grip upon your windpipe,
the blunt pain deep inside your femur,
the dark edge arcing at the horizon
in your dreams or waking gaze.

In that still stratum of existence,
that lilting stream of secret thought
where no son or daughter enters in,
there the soul walks with worry
day and night
lost in a whispered discourse.

We must have all bathed
in that gentle stream,
its silent water lapping at our feet.
When you looked up, distracted,
as if from reading
Donne or Herbert
your ruminations
cannot have been
unsensed.

That thing you gave me,
that dark gift,
I bear like a secret
beneath my winter coat.
I know you never meant it
to be mine.

But the glade was darkening
when you walked that field
and your gaze was fixed
worriedly
on a shimmering
in the distant woods.