Letter To My Lover After Seven Years

You gave me the child that seamed my belly & stitched up my life. You gave me: one book of love poems, five years of peace & two of pain. You gave me darkness, light, laughter & the certain knowledge that we someday die. You gave me seven years during which the cells of my body died & were reborn. Now we have died into the limbo of lost loves, that wreckage of memories tarnishing with time, that litany of losses which grows longer with the years, as more of our friends descend underground & the list of our loved dead outstrips the list of the living. Knowing as we do our certain doom, knowing as we do the rarity of the gifts we gave & received, can we redeem our love from the limbo, dust it off like a fine sea trunk found in an attic & now more valuable for its age & rarity than a shining new one? Probably not. This page is spattered with tears that streak the words lose, losses, limbo. I stand on a ledge in hell still howling for our love