I wait for your step.
A jay on the cherry tree
trembles the blossom
  
I name you my love
and the gulls fly above us
calling to the air.
 
Our two pale bodies
move in the late night, slowly
as doves do, breathing.
 
And then you are gone.
A night-owl mourns in darkness
for the moon's last phase.

The clocks slid back an hour
and stole light from my life
as I walked through the wrong part of town,
mourning our love.
 
And, of course, unmendable rain
fell to the bleak streets
where I felt my heart gnaw
at all our mistakes.
 
If the darkening sky could lift
more than one hour from this day
there are words I would never have said
nor have heard you say.
 
But we will be dead, as we know,
beyond all light.
These are the shortened days
and the endless nights.

Yes, I think a poem is a spell of kinds
that keeps things living in a written line,
whatever's lost or leaving - lock of rhyme -
and so I write and write and write your name.