Instance

Often snippets of poems, strings of words, flicker in and out of existence in my head, but it's been a rare event, lately, for me to sit down and try to tease out a whole poem. I did that tonight, struggling to finish this as my eyes fluttered and my body kept reminding me that I should be asleep, long asleep. It's past two a.m. and if any part of me is still operating on eastern time, that would translate to five a.m. I finished the poem so I can go to bed, and maybe tomorrow I'll look at it again and see if I come to regret posting an unedited first draft of a poem written while about eighty percent conscious.

Instance

sunlight catches your face,
just a hint of it, filtered
through sycamore leaves, through
a raging patch of wild maples,
and i point the camera,
to reinterpret this perfect instance
of you,
ahead of me.
your smile, even faint, that smile,
causes the dappled light to pale,
stripping this forgotten world of majesty
in your presence,
and I,
imperfect in your presence,
press myself into the shutter, the
weight of every inherited flaw expressed,
at last, in the bending of my finger,
into that button, and at my most
powerful, I make the aperture gasp,
a simple click and whir, a simple
attempt
to hold

the tress do not sway, staunch and
stolid against the absence of any
breeze, and they grip their
leaves as armor, blocking me from the sun,
save scattered patches,
reinvented light.

so if i let this instrument speak, if
I taught it to sing, there would be
only one song and it
would be just this: you
were not not to be captured, you
wanted no earthy possession,
and you
were never here at all
in this place, with me. never
here

it comes
as a sigh, this morose truth,
as an exhalation, a
substitute for wind, otherwise so still,
and I press that button again
shooting only the air.

---
Next day, I don't hate it. Made a couple edits so this is officially a second draft now.