In those long-ago days,
whenever possible, we lay
braided like eager wisteria
in spring, your leg around mine,
mine around yours, requiring
no little untangling should

one of us want to turn over
or rise. And then the other
would reach out with
come-back hands, and,
often without words, we’d
weave ourselves together
again.

Affairs of the heart
can ignite like that, and
while not my first, only
with you did I awaken
disoriented, tangled
in a fiery dream that
neither of us wanted
to extinguish.

I feared we’d burn so
ferociously that we would
crumble to ash, and in
that disintegration
I would not remember
you.

All meeting ends in parting,
said the Buddha.

Lying in your bed or mine,
face to face, you’d run your
hand down the curve of
my torso and hip,
promising the impossible:

I will remind you.

What if you don’t know
where I am? I’d ask, with a
foresight that seared me.

And you would assure me,
I will find you in this life or the next.
I will always find you.

I didn’t say, Even if we end up
with others? Even if we die?

Because romantic me wanted
to believe that somehow,
eons afterward, we could
return to that state of
green love, raw and crisp,
even if it exists only in other
existences yet to come.

And all these decades later,
in dreams, I find myself
half-hoping that parting
might end in meeting,
that each of us still carries
an ancient, tiny spark,

which, on a breath,
in a future lifetime,
a fresh lifespace,
might one day rise
and warm us again.