(Season One)

That warm day in winter

I thought it was around the fifteenth of December

But is wasn’t, because at a certain age

There is no distinction between events.

 

Now we have reconnected after forty-five years;

It is true that we were eighteen once,

And held each other instantly, grasping?

 

Youth propels and persists for long enough

To meld a pantheon of taut links

Bonding and imprinting like magnets and clay.

 

I see how you became a bright singularity;

From the World’s great untenable lottery

We drew a common cosmos

Be there still

Be there alone and rejoicing in seeing me for the first time

 

When we drove all night and saw lights

Of a town, and then lights of a cool dawn that

I thought would be our natural immovable home.

 

I recall breathless, gasping revelations of compound curves

Bodies uncovering, the road heat-shimmer reflecting like

Delicate mirrors excellently inlayed into pavement

As the ice finally and instantly melted,

And the air pausing as if distracted by lovers under a Christmas tree.

 

I took all the bones out of that fish, that Sea Bass. Remember?

And the flesh was left in disarray, unrecognizable, unappetizing.

It was stew or sauce for that fish that fell below our expectations.

 

 

Isolation drew us to each other and enclosed us, lonely,

Like the Walnut trees that spread toxin through their roots

To keep the encroaching competing plants at bay and

Then lament their aloneness.

 

A cruel survival that is necessary, isolating, and autonomous as

Breathing, secured to a brain of succumbing

And becoming.

I wish I had watched you swim, catch other fish,

 

Seduce the boy who lived in a mobile home

And who pretended to be afraid of the hex I put on his car.

Extending roots, he was reaching and more adept

At rivalry, because he didn’t have to know lyrics

About bones in fish, about a startling singularity.

 

I lament and mourn those guilty lost children

Desperately conceiving love

As their lives assembled into decades.