Christmas Rose
. . . . . . . .—for Julio
With fog-pressed lids
neither opened nor closed,
through Christmas morning’s
blind white rose
we traveled shoreward
on vanishing roads.
We hardly spoke.
You had to drive.
And I had to dream
that we’d never arrive,
that this distance between us
was what kept love alive.
That distance grew greater
once we stood there, onshore,
before an invisible
ocean’s roar,
our outlines dissolving
till less was more—
and shapeless now
we two were one
and each was all
and all were none
and love, for a moment,
was all undone.
Stepping toward you,
with my eyes aglaze,
perhaps for a moment
I was afraid—
but your hair, escaping
from its braid,
leapt into focus,
from blankness hurled.
Each strand, a string
of condensing pearls,
bloomed through the fog
like the edge of a world.
(Christmas Day, 2015—Long Island)
by R. Nemo Hill
Editor’s Note: It would be easy to spend a thousand words deconstructing the feet in this carefully metered poem (variation! enjambment!), but that would gut the delicate complexity of the narrative: love can be as lucid as fog, or as sharp as the edge of a water droplet.
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