I want to see you every day we're in this life

I 

 

This morning I'm more lonely than the sky, 

that flattened tray of tin and rain 

 

before the robin's quick array of ruddy breasts 

displayed the air a way that's new 

 

as when in their noisy gang 

they flew against the blue 

 

like stitches in a quilt 

that's being aired out with a shake. 

 

I take some solace watching starlings 

with their yellow bills root among the leaves. 

 

They're plump with some success, those clerks. 

Field notes, perhaps, or a survey of the seeds. 

 

II 

 

Your day still sits under the horizon 

while mine unfolds in steps I take 

to make myself familiar here: 

breakfast in the kitchen, carry tea upstairs, 

watch a squirrel hop across the lawn, 

keep a careful list of birds I've seen. 

Tai chi, before or after. 

 

I know we're on the same planet, 

the same sun coming in the east window. 

I know how and why time zones float 

like gauzy curtains across the globe. 

But here's the fact that sends me to the page. 

 

I want to see you every day we're in this life, 

mark change with you as we change, as we age, 

for it's true, as you say, it took a long time 

for us to find each other and much pain. 

I think only of telling you 

about these birds, these swales of rain 

and flowering trees so different from our own. 

 

This would be another world 

with you in it. 

 

No—you are the world. 

 

[Eloise Klein Healy {1943- } 'Love Poem From Afar', from Fire on Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry]