When I met you, looked deep into
those black, velvety eyes,
I knew I’d found my muse,
a Blue jay: ashen, muted grief,
steel-blue quietude and
a mosaic brilliance concealed
except when you glided
on wings of poetry,
the Cherry Blossom tunnel
I walked through
all those years, stooped,
no longer seemed dreary,
and as I read between the lines
you wrote, knowing you
and finding me in those spaces,
I stopped and looked up at the steeple
of the old Methodist
Chapel in that quiet cul-de-sac
not far from where we lived
and watched creation waltzing
with stern architecture
with her golden auburn feet,
like you’d put it, I stood there
and waited for nightfall
and for once perceived
the stars in that simple
yet transcendent way you saw them,
and I felt the beauty
only you could capture,
but life has this uncanny knack
of separating us from the people
we hold most dear,
often they move away slowly like
glaciers and that hurt ebbs with time,
but sometimes they’re
taken from us in ways
we never fathomed, and that grief
flows through our veins like lava,
burning with remorse,
an indomitable regret,
I should have done more, maybe
just a gentle hold of
that cascading brown hair,
or a soft kiss at dawn,
I should have read deeper
and found that though your
verse reflected love,
there were undercurrents of
hopelessness threatening to drown you,
I should have fought harder,
but these words are silent sighs now,
just abstract hope like the
Minister of the church gave me
when he said,
“God took her in that dark way,”
but he wasn’t there when I came home
and saw that diagonal slash,
the red puddle that still
stains sleepless nights,
he didn’t hear my shaking
plea for grace,
wondering in bewilderment
if I’d loved your sonnets more
than you, clasping those
delicate, Petrarchan fingers
and gazing at the ideal,
and he certainly didn’t
read the last love poem I ever wrote
fighting both volatile anger
and calamitous sorrow,
those final scribbles on a sheet
in which I enclosed the
ring I gave you, placing a
pearl back in an oyster shell,
laying it on the light brown
coffin, and trying futilely
to let everything fade.
Ordinary Person 
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