with the winter of my 68th year,
skirting just ahead of my birthday,
and felt much the way an old friend
who has changed beyond recognition
might seem to a stranger –
slightly familiar, but unknown.
My feet still within the world
carry me to foreign counties,
where the snows of receding life
blow thinner now and scattered,
by dim kens and confusions
that really must not matter,
in pens and dreams and would-bes,
and fail to halt the confused
and swirling eddies of faults
known and those evinced.
When I reach with my hand and my love,
I see you grasp it with the same,
above and over through the years.
But you left and let go long since,
and I am alone with this fancy,
though my need still sees you
clear and smiling and as near
as once you were yet somehow
that same part of me remains,
unable to forget but eager to claim
that longing only filled by you.
Should I give that away?
Should I allow time’s indifferent
sway to claim and then discard
truth’s subtle etching of our way?
Thin buttresses of hope and youth will
form no lasting berm against trope,
though perhaps the wispy tracing
of words across a page place
testament enough of you and of me,
and all there ever is and less
of all that was and might have been.
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