Remember?

There was a moment well loved, twenty paces away,

beaming with pride from that distanced day:

do you remember? It seems like we cried

more than we spoke,

that we were breathing new angst emitted

from years of neglect.

I wouldn’t take it back, retract my own brain

any further from pain than the love of that day.

Singing, recall? We were praising the rain:

when it came,

where it went, unbattered and retrained

to seek dryer places than the rims of your face,

but now I am drowning in a river renamed.

Let me breathe, now.

I would sooner pass through, like a beautiful flame

before the sun,

so no eyes could proclaim. You are still within,

alighting unremissed

on a terrible bearing, a dark momentary glance.

Again, sinking like a fool into a dark fragrant bush

looking for something never to be retrieved,

since I never should have looked. Again,

I lost the key,

I don’t know where it slid,

besting my worst mistakes, I never did

again. There is love in the shadiest enclave,

love like the forests in which we laid, bared

and perfect in the mind of a fool unexplained,

inching toward an oblivion improperly due.

And I do

not wait for the apologies construed

as malevolence wrought nor restlessness brewed,

you might

imagine a future opportunity below

those waters uncharted, impossibly controlled.

Let me breathe.