Adieu

we … sat here once … so long ago it’s a dream - a mirage of another life, like a desert’s distant, fiery fog … we were brine, I, salt to your water - churning surf that broke upon another - that reef … HER, (your bestie - my paramour) … we three, dangling lazily in the summer doldrums, filling empty space awaiting the pending promises of autumn. but now, we are ripples, expanding - outward … away - yesterday’s onerous ache … the echo of three young fools in a whirlwind, spun from the high fells to the heathered meadows, from the meadows to the ocean’s toothy hem, from that jagged break to an abyss, unforgiving … where those moments, those dear, precious, idiotic instances - callow, quick and careless - are now and forever … drowned. yet … I remember your wit, (a woman’s wit, tho’ just a girl) - its bloom AND its blade - oft’ to coax a smile, but also, ever prowling for a miscalculation, ready to pounce … I close my eyes and recall the honey of her lips, and what hid beneath the short-sleeve tickle of cashmere, how my eager hands, like Braille, could not read her enough - never enough … how the candy of her mouth was like melting sugar, and how the odd trio we comprised - the twined, chaotic tensions - always hung there, obvious but oblique, like mistletoe left … until May. now … eyes opened, I say a word-or-two, toss the mental wreath, (roses withered), dust the illusory ashes, pull a long breath deeply IN, and blow it out hard - hard enough to make ripples on the water’s moonlit surface - or, perhaps … they came from below, bubbles of a gasp … the last gulp of our trio’s torrid, tender memory, giving up the ghost … to the deep.