Keeping Account

Now that I am less shy in this blogging world, I feel like putting some of my poetry out there. This I wrote last summer, a month before Keith left. I found it when I was reviewing my old files and it gave me a lift of spirit, to remember what it felt like at that point, and how I have reached this one. The rest of the time will pass by as quickly as the last four months did; it must!

-Keeping Account-
Today I remembered the first time summer wasn't forever.
Barely begun I had sensed the inevitable end;
no longer the bright, unbroken sea.
Adulthood hovered over me, my snarled hair,
my fleet and calloused feet, poised.
I've mourned ever since.
Perhaps only in a finite lens does life burn fierce enough to leave a mark;
no stranger to intensity, perhaps I needed the end for its singular clarity.
I woke this morning to a dimming of the light outside the blinds;
even then the sun appeared to be vanishing.
I knew the compass of the earth had tipped over to the other side and the sun would rise more and more reluctantly.
Not until the end of the year, rimed and tattered, will the balance turn again.
Accustomed to the darkness, most people will not notice.
I will, and I will note that even then the weight of more than half a year will lie between myself and your return.
In fact, I will not feel your face between my hands again until the sun tilts once more into its steady burial and the leaves prepare for flight.
There will be leaves in the gutters and flowers bundled in their earthenware crocks when you come home, the air will still shimmer and taste of dust,
the summer barely past.
We'll put that starving year behind us, its bones thin, weary, and turn together to the coming winter.