Evermay-on-the-Delaware

You sleep in the sharp Adirondack chair,
surrounded by a still cloud of larkspur
and I am in the long shadows of lupine
which almost reach you in the late afternoon.
I'm remembering the night of our wedding,
how rain throbbed on the windshield, each drop
a shadow blooming somewhere on the map.
I wanted you to know the way along
roads blurred by a fury of rain. I yearned
for you to reinvent yourself as lightning
spread its repertoire, its variations.
But love is each repetition, each small return;
night after night love is the way you gather
the birds, lifting their cage like a lantern.



"Evermay-on-the-Delaware" from Nine Skies by A.V. Christie. Copyright © 1997 by A.V. Christie. Reprinted with the permission of University of Illinois Press.