moments

moments

Friday, August 31, 2018



Above our queen bed for twenty-two years;
a strand of pearls, a gift for an anniversary,
Related imagenot that unlike rubies or diamonds yet
their fusion was both flat and brilliant.
To know they were true I held them against
my teeth like a blessed long ago stone rosary.
When readying to move from Vermont to California
I swaddled the pearls in a yesterday’s Times Argus.
I worried about the smudges I’d surely find later.
My own blackened hands told the same truth,
and thirty-two hundred miles is a long way to go.
Years later I still wonder which slightly damaged
liquor box I put the strand in. The same dark dream
haunts like a vampire, gnaws at the base of my throat.
The very place I wish her pearls now hung.

xo

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