Picture & Poem

With words and books and everything on death
there is sometimes nothing left but complete and pure
focus, forward movement, no regret or sadness or
nostalgia or anything but me and you
right now.

With the turn of your head I’m happy and present, able to reach
the quick blackness of sleep with dreams of the Atlantic when I was
sixteen (or was it seventeen?) and craved the warmth of the hot sun.
I burned my skin on the sand, I stung my eyes with saltwater.

There were two goats greeting us at the Haitian village,
a crowd of children dusted with sweat and dirt.
We fed them candy and on the way home
outstretched our hands along the sugarcane fields,
knelt beneath the low hanging sky.