For Sophie



One day and seven months ago, your

blessed death took you into your

blessed spirit, rekindled your

blessed Wisdom and shuttered my heart

against another fur-person coming to stay.



By calendar, it was barely summer

that twenty-eighth day of June,

though hot as blazes, and here it is

January's end with yet another sixty-degree

day in a winter peppered with spring.



Your grave - just beyond the porch and

under the paper-bark birches - is guarded

by the little grey fox you loved, festooned

by a Salter Path whirly-gig rainbow

of a wind catcher.



I've needed the color; needed, too,

the reminder of movement that Wind

(my great, long friend) always brings; because,

Sophie? - it is like a second death to me

that I can no longer recall your eyes.



Losing again the light that was in them (and

only because of my old, useless memory)

makes my head bow down in sorrow

as familiar tears fall, this time

for a new and unfamiliar loss.



Without your eyes in my inner vision,

it's as if I've lost my own sight; or lost,

at least, the long view I need now

to soften the blow.

And so what remains?



What ever remains when loss

(and loss again) falls like snow,

falls thick and fast to pile,

flake upon gathering flake,

against and across a once-boundless heart?



I pause, waiting for an answer.



All I hear is a muffled beating,

a silent yearning for just one more

blessed look into golden eyes, just one more

blessed lie-down with you stretched across

my chest, matching me breath for breath in love.