At which your ghost of ashes
Tonight, I imagine myself old
And still grieving for you, still
Unable to be in a crowd
Without the broken steed of melancholy
Rearing in my brain.
Sometimes I want to leave
Everything behind
To track the fragments of your absence
And know nothing of the comforts
I strained so hard to retrieve.
Against the June-black sky,
Cottonwoods loosen their seeds
Small white knots of leaving
And I see myself old
And this falling always
Beneath the rooted snow.
You sent me a postcard from New Zealand
It's like you to remember my birthday
Not with stupid glassware from the Bay, pens,
Repentant notes - “dinner when I strike it
Rich” - but with an image; this year, the sky
Zagging open with light and trees, a brace
Of them. The wind so culling that branches
Are basted flat, all form lost, no, a new
Form imposed, one including elements
Of weather, Jeffers' quantitative verse
That drew its length from ocean and from wind.
Your unwinding journey through Bombay, Cape
Town, Aotearoa shapes words rich
With love's abstractions - this is how you speak
To me: “beauty” “soul” “dreams” - which I forgive.