When he was here with her

the day was a fragrant sheen

of lily-of-the-valley, warm as skin

lolling under June’s bloomed sun.

With lips to her shoulder he

murmured love, momentous

as incantation in strange new language,

words like tiny birds freed from other worlds.

She sees them embracing at water’s edge,

fingers entwined, fledgling roots nourishing

roots they thought could never separate.

But there was no partaking of night’s

indigo power nor the incarnadine of daybreak.

They somehow got lost at the horizon, yet

spoke here and there like ghosts

through want and need.

In time life was built of something else,

they grew up, grew resolute, older, old.

But even now she hears his voice of honey,

words as wings brushing against bare shoulder,

recalls water and wind tasting of salt, amber and him,

that time a relief, a reckoning-

back then, when he was here, she was his

and they became crystalline in the passing light