42.

The absence of your breath heats my marrow

As impossible as that might be: touch

Has a history of its own. Your hair

Will outlast stone. The dream of speech

The breeze on the leaves, the voices

Of our children in my brain, like a great

Code, a music and score wired into the soul

That word stuns modernity like Mao’s

Gun barrel. How do we estimate

The children we were and take the distance

We are, apart, and not be wistful?

The almond trees will be blooming

In Provence far from the snows of then

As they cut our ankles in the north wind.