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