My letters spoke of nothing
     but money, rent, and tasks.
How those sterile pages
     must have sunk you.

No ardent bard’s lament
     obsessed with absent charms
     and beguiling, winsome wit.
No dancing phrases sketched
     a figure out of reach,
     an avid urge for distant flesh.
No tune of lyric sighs
     invoked a muted voice
     of sweetest timber, tone, and tang.
No rhapsodic lines
     to speak of empty arms,
     barren sheets and silent pillow.
Inky words loped along
     in mindless circuit
     of money, rent, and tasks.
All striding, dusty boots,
     a clockwise sameness
     of money, rent, and tasks.

The painful days of distance? nothing said.
The awesome heart-deep brooding? nothing said.
The playful, comic jesting? nothing said.
The spirit-lifting touches? nothing said.

If I could find an open door in time,
step through that smokey portal,
leave behind the burning flow of days,
snatch back those barren pages,
scratch out those useless lines
and sit again with pen and paper
to summon up the richness
from all those vanished moments,
unleash a cache of words,
robust and full and rich
that you deserved to read,
to fill up all the margins of the letters you preserved,
the letters we exchanged
when penmanship was all we had to share.

for lisa on our anniversary, 2024