I never wrote a single line
about you when we were
together, lost in each other
in those weeks and months
when there was Time –
the air took on a different
flavor, each moment choosing
it’s guardians as cherubs in dusty
homage to the City’s spring –
while the war we watched on TV
became an afterthought, a glance
toward our own mortality,
our lives becoming lost in car
exhaust & vendor foods, and
a thousand moms of laundry
yet I reached for you and touched
you, touched gracious clouds
through the blue silk of sky-smell
where the komorebi illumes the
cottonwoods of a brittle moon that
we feast on, like Chacoans, we journeyed
into the mountains of a vanished
river wine, traversed to lands of a love
set vertiginous and utterly unknown
© K. James Ribble
