BPR 47 | 2020
Found only in small pieces like a scattered
puzzle or a house shattered by hurricane,
the whole will never be complete, most of it
having vanished with the seemingly important—
not that large parts hadn’t been necessary once, only
their lights were frail, sconces with one candle.
This is why I have forgotten, lost the accolade,
the medal, the parade tiny with distance.
Some parts might stay: your hand covering mine
on a red-flowered tablecloth in Mesilla, New Mexico;
on a yellow tablecloth in a Greek fishing village—
and that blue morning when I opened her blanket
and showed our baby the ocean at Nags Head,
your arm around us.
And surely something keeps our night
beside a lake covered with hundreds of migrating
swans settling, singing the savage darkness up
past midnight, past cut-crystal stars
where some things may yet turn and stay
in distant lights that burn and burn.