Andrea's Baptism

Do you recall being bathed in soft yellow

like butter and candlelight and sunrise

all distilled in one perfect moment?

Do you remember this sight  filtered through 

the lids of your squeezed shut eyes?

Because you were there and it was there.

Do you remember all that beauty, 

right at the beginning of your story?

A story that would chase perfect light and colour

and then more perfect light and colour, always

seeking the lines and shadows that illuminated you 

at the very start. 

Soft Focus

My slide scanner is today's ouija board
summoning you from the digital darkness where
you dwell on, forever
twenty-five and impossibly far from sorrows
that lay ahead. The end not even thinkable.

Your face startles with its sudden appearance
on my screen. Pixels resolving into you, blurry
vaguely out of focus and out of reach. And so young,
your face unreadable as you consider your photographer.
Your new husband. Was he a disappointment yet?
Or is that longing. You must have wanted him then.
A desire that would endure beyond tolerance
and defy reason.

What does reason have to do with it, you might
be thinking. The light is soft. The man is here
and there is only now.

Love in the Time of the CoronaVirus

We are together. Washing

hands and holding

each other in the dark and sometimes the light

of these very dark days and dull

times.  So much time

to listen to the clock’s digital hum

and the whisper of my breath while clouds echo

the grayness of the news.

And I remember a season full of sun

and risk when I would have given anything for an hour

of time alone with you, away from the tugging world

and our lives apart.

Wait, just now.

Is that a quickening of my breath? A stuttering 
of my pulse?

Fear, passion, virus.

It feels the same.