Tenuous leaves move on the tongue of wind. Everything is becoming open to the horizon again.

Arms wrapped across my chest, I move through these cold evenings like a Klondike prospector towards the fires that are your eyes in the half dark.

Waking on my side of the bed, I place my hand on the smooth expanse of white where once your shock of white hair was arrayed, a sea for the yacht of my mouth to sail upon.

Remember what I said when we were young, and my fingers now touching you in black & white were less like these crooked twigs? We were in that room by the sea, and I was hiding in your black hair, a rain cloud spread across a clear blue day. I said I wouldn't be able to know the world without the clarity of openings that is your body coming into lamplight at dusk.

Now the world is all white. Ski and moose tracks bead the snowfields. And I wander in these woods remembering how this morning in the greenhouse, I saw, again, your curled fingers enter into the whorl of orchids to taste their colors: chartreuse, mauve, crimson, and finally ivory as translucent as your hair.

Note: This poem came to me, in light of a wonderful movie, "Away from Her" I saw last night, in this period of time I am spending waiting for a flight to Chicago from Jacksonville. It also, in some sense, ties in with this other poem I wrote a while ago.

Time plays its accordion. Observe its swift keys of bright and dark.

I have to tell you in these recent years I have been labeled: driftwood, spindrift, shrapnel of glass, an ash city after fires. All of which are perhaps apt given every song I had begun to sing became a dirge.

Now when you call me dulcet, I ask, how will you know whose music you are hearing, unless you touch a spine: mine or time's accordion's?