Photo by me. Others here

What did I read, I wonder, In those in-between years That spanned abandonment, And grief, and finally silence,

As I open this old book of love Sonnets I had just bought in a used Bookstore? I shake the dust And scatter syllables with

My tongue, which has by now Forgotten most of the twenty-one Names it had once invented for you. And while I am chanting this line

y te parces a la palbra melancolia, Stray news arrives, in gossip’s Envelope, of an impeding Wedding. Yours. And with scarcely

A pause, talk goes on to other busy Matters that the days fill themselves With, remaining as blank as before. I press ahead with this recitation:

How the night wind revolves in The sky and sings! And how dust Settles over skin that has changed And yet remembers all the same.