After everything

some long ago beach, 1988

You can lie on your back on pale pink linen sheets and listen to a single bird's song but only hear the page of the newspaper turn, a cup brought to the lips, a swallow.

You can have felt the bed beneath you move like an ocean, two boats with lazy oars moving away from each other, the water dark beneath.

You can have climbed up a leaf-strewn hill somewhere outside of Hartford, scrambling, and grabbed hands for the pulling.

You can have walked up the stairs, dark, the house in the woods, and heard the low laugh, seen the pale form in the hall and turned to walk down.

Since the brothers flew their dream machine on a cloudy day, the pale sand piled up in dunes, and only the air remembered.

Love never dies; it just goes underground.