No One Word

No doubt these years later I remember

Both more and less than there was,

The necessary evasions and elaborations

One comes to after a long time alone.

 

There should be a new word for old love,

One I'd write in the dust of your books

Still on the shelf, some last thought of us

Resolving into all the words never said.

 

I could tell you now how your paintings

Of Giverny and Argenteuil and Arles 

Became windows, portals to passages

Never made, though I picture us there.

 

Or how the small pane of stained glass

You hung by the fireplace prisms into

A blaze of light when the sun catches it,

And moonlight turns its pale roses white.

 

Another spring, and you would have said

The cottonwoods are snowing, the drifts of

Puffy flakes frosting the window-screens.

There is no one word for any of this.  O  

 

My dear, my empty life in crowded rooms.

 





Poetry by countryfog
Read 534 times
Written on 2012-04-06 at 15:41

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Wumbulu
Very good, reminds me of my favourite poet T.S.Eliot's ' Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' The last line especially reminds me of: "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."
2012-04-25


josephus The PoetBay support member heart!
Such a wonderful expression of long lost love through the lens of years. There is such painfully textured sadness in your last line.

"O My dear, my empty life in crowded rooms"
2012-04-11



'There should be a new word for old love.' I agree. In fact, I think we need a new word for all love--it's been usurped and vulgarized to point where it's barely a word at all, just a string of alphabet letters or a vocalization of sounds.

Fabulous poem of longing and remembrance.
2012-04-07


ken d williams The PoetBay support member heart!
An inspiration poem C F
Ken
2012-04-06