Issue Eighteen - Summer 2011

The Last Time I Saw You

By Ande Finley

For Loren

What have we lost
to know
a brother, a husband
a friend
was needed elsewhere,
that life absorbs death
transmutes dying into
something with weight, form, color,
loans our blinkered eyes
a wider lens.

The last time I saw you
I learned
finally
the shape of joy, simple
wordless delight
numbers and dates, the minutiae
swept aside,
nearly unmoored
you drifted
tugging, bobbing,
impatient to reach
what sits on the shore of our memory
the singing slivers of honeyed light
sweet balm for the wounds
inflicted by these reckless bodies.

What have we lost
as we stand grasping
for your fingers, one last smile,
a single story left to tell,
so tangled in questions
that walking out
through the lapping silence
of our grieving love
feels like an answer.

Copyright Finley 2011

Ande Finley is euphoric to see her life-long dream of writing full time manifesting here in her remote Lopez forest. Her English major in college morphed somehow into a professional life of crunching numbers and she guiltily filed her writing life away until all her kids had left home. Now, she mainly composes for herself, but her work has appeared in Uncapped, Satsang, and previously in SHARK REEF. With the help of her brilliantly-creative family, she produced her first chapbook, Simply Love, to commemorate her mother’s 75th birthday. She offers heartfelt thanks to her husband Scott for all the years of unwavering support.

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