At the very first and very least I thought
"I remember this, from somewhere earlier innocent";
Response to something wordlessly sweetly falling 
whisper-softly 
against not ears this time
	but Eyes
a twinkling rush electric-nervous-hope
A fresh Spring promise of lawn - with yet the 
diaphanous luster of late snow

And I would not call us quite as lost - 
	or are we so intensely rational?
But a moment thing it was when one thousand five-hundred 
miles away
		(A penance paid AT&T)
You let for me your voice go dancing light-steps
						Across the phrase of words 
we took for ourselves
Resolute in our power to - our dominion over bons mots 
And its trailing your voice over the words' end; 
shaking-your-head-and-laughing, with your tone
And if not yet lost, then perhaps, with charm like that in 
a polyphony

But a photograph left me, with you too far gone, to return 
and to stare - 
                    a pilgrimage via modem - (we are so advanced!)
At a face plaintive, unpainted, poetically straight - the 
kind who kisses like a quest, 
							Kisses like it 
means something
And thinks and talks and lives with that same flaming 
purpose intent
Or falls quiet in the absence of devotion gave to dreams
 and to books and to thoughts and to lives
				or given back by the same
But these weeks are days, and better ones for it - some
 ineffable me that both had forgotten - 
some you if not tangible then closer, often, than touching

© J. Isaac Wood,  July 20, 1997