you look different in the mid-morning light

You look different in the mid-morning light, 

in the 10 a.m. flat vivid 

I can count each feathery hair that sprouts from the pores on your cheeks,  

a brief reminder that we were animals once before we stood on two feet,

                       animals still in the deep night tangled together,

         humans again when the honey-colored dawn leaks in to tickle our eyelids.

I trace the window-shaped sunspot drifting across the carpet with my eyes 

and the silhouette of your arm with my fingertips,

Wake up, baby,

but I don’t want to, 

I want to graze my blind hands over the memory of you.

It’s trapped in blue ink on the postcards you sent me, 

one from each of the places 

you’d wished I could’ve seen with you-

                    words which now, 

            stashed in a cardboard box in the bottom right corner of my childhood bedroom’s closet, 

   sit dusty atop a stack of yellowed birthday cards deemed too cherishable to toss and 

         adolescent love letters on college-ruled notebook paper,

                         their sentiment buried 

in the bottom right corner 

of my mind.

I keep you there too, because-

           you told me this- 

   nothing lasts forever,

not the bitter acid rain and not 

        that sweet, fleeting honeysuckle season,

and the light today affects just the same as it did yesterday 

and will tomorrow,

and forever, I suppose,

me sleeping under the green earth by then,

your love growing cobwebs in a long-forgotten box

     in the bottom right corner of my

thrice-great grandchild’s basement cupboard.