Even a perfect evening eventually yawns
and goes to sleep to awaken changed in the morning.
Each day must be wrestled for beauty among
this permanent impermanence where clouds shift their
shape in the shifting wind and the sudden blossomings of illness,
the carcinomas in the brain, change the possible
future to a river’s mouth widening at the sea’s edge.
And yet there is a durability here,
lives that somehow replenish themselves
around a center in the gravity of affection, the way
the earth turns itself to be touched everywhere
by the light. What else can I say to you tonight,
that meaning is the wine we press from the context we
share, that our daily devotion depends on a presence and
absence, on arms that gather the invisible flowers we find
growing among our ruins, and arms that bear
nothing but a guarded emptiness, a space preserved,
a dependable harbor waiting for someone we love.
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