How much time does it take to be well with things,
The vast and intimate things now inside us
Not as memory or idea but as mutuality,
In the creation of strain, torque, torpor in the vacuum,
The emptiness, the longing of long hollows to echo the depth
In breath and waiting.

It is to her eyes passing over the object of me,
Abject as a pinned moth on a board or
Styrofoam chipping ever smaller but
Never dissolved completely away.
The past as a pollution of micro plastics in the tide,
The warm shallow waters pressing the muggy beach.

We waited a long time for the traffic to break up
So we could go, go back to innocence,
Inviolate, pure, trusting the intuition of what we say
As the rain trusts the surface of the lake to keep its secrets.
See the sadness and loss as the water rushes off in a torrent
For some other lover,
Some evaporation of the feeling we shared
Where the price is too high and we wish
We could go back to the clouds on our own terms,
Definite and limited.