We had it made, my love, and do you think,
When looking back, it could be working still?
Well, thank you, dear. I take that potent drink
Which may protect me from this sudden chill.
I do remember being young and sure,

I love the clamor of young voices shrieking
as they play in and out of the turquoise square
which shimmers where the sun excites it.

There is sensuality in sand running through
my toes, my foot a timer for the speed
with which the sun moves.

Before she saw Rothko’s colors before that late-life baptism
she was a parochial pagan bowing to a mediocrity of wheat
fields. Fine enough for a county-bound girl in Oklahoma gold
iridescent grain speaking seasons: combines, bales, harvest.

It’s not summer’s greenery I love but winter’s
deciduous branches yearning upward, sky falling into them,
blue or darker blue, a star or two descending slowly, limb to limb.

Like an argument, they proceed, more often than not
complex but every iteration visible, one growing directly from the other.

He likes to mow on Wednesday mornings
and it’s in the fifties with sun
the color of good April poems.
I hear the hum of spring at last,

No, the bad news hasn’t reached me yet,
though my body’s been preparing for it.
We’ve come a long way from the Pony Express.
Still, the distances have been challenging
to cross, the obstacles to overcome—
childhood, some bruises and broken bones,

I dreamt the laptop in our bedroom
only achieved its stupendous power
with the help of demons that, of course,
exact their price. In my science
fiction dream these beings imperceptibly