a hot croissant
fresh from the toaster oven
slightly greasy
with a smear of butter
and a blob of blueberry jam
small still life for a saturday morning
while seismic things
happened elsewhere
down the telephone wires
along synapses
through the soul’s sensors
to the true mind of the heart
our lives changed
in places we could not see
because we could not see
all that was visible was this croissant
that remained half-eaten on the plate
half a life, still

Greece was burning; we flamed our last words.
A dryness of tenderness gone wrong, skin taut
In an unremitting refusal.
Pain singes. A man and woman separated
By a sere hillside
Grasses vulnerable, no forces left to save us.

The next day the flames reached Olympia.
I sent him a last letter. Now we are stone.
There were tears for memories
Not of him, not yet
Tears for the Peloponnese
Memories of Zaharo
Where I once saw massive headlines
Announcing the fires at Chernobyl
Or Areopolis in the Mani
Where I stumbled drunk
into the heat of a long-ago marriage.
Or Kaiafa, safe by the water, beyond the flames
Where, pregnant, I first heard my child speak to me

A world is burning up. So it goes
With sentiments left to dry
On sere hillsides. I pray for Olympia,
For the safety and tenderness of memory
For the day soft stone will resist fire.

it does not rain in summer here
mere thickness of unspent cloud
cold
years of anticipation condemned to dissolve
hard thin drops against sequoia bark

memory falls soft and plump
yet fading distant
I want a summer rain, a lushness still
of suddenness, drops tender warm on petals
not this harshness so dry in its
thoughtless bending to the fog

Your silence cuts
the space I had made for you
now carved and emptied, scarred
whose hand? your own
touching elsewhere
or mine forced by memory
and treason hope
where is trust
too dull a blade
to protect against
imaginings resonant with
the sounds you would not give me

You cannot remember where you have never been.
But they are there
Those same trees, the cabin, the bed where you would make love
On an afternoon of honey-making
There is a corner
In a wine country village
Where street signs cross
Spelling your maiden name
You would go there together
And wonder about a person you once were
And who you might become
If this memory of a time you never spent
Honey-making
Were to become brittle fact.

But what you fear
Is lack of chance
The street signs are there
But what were the odds they would spell your name?