Some nights I hate biology. The beat
of his heart in an aging chest is steady still;
we have decades left, if all goes well.
Yet odds are, some sunrise I will meet
a day that does not hold his face,
a day preceding years without his hands
on me. I’m flying home. Criss-cross the land,
yet even in this high, removed space,
I close my eyes and he is here, the scent
of soap and sweat and man. Yet how long
will it remain, this scent, when he is gone?
I understand why grieving widows rent
their clothes, raked face with bloody nails,
and pierced the night with their abandoned wails.
******
March 24, 2013
somewhere over the mid-Atlantic