When I was young
I felt you in the wind

of the world
that spun along the shore

of the fierce Atlantic
where I grew up

far from you,
ahead in time,

lost in those years
I was searching

for someone
I could not name,

who would arrive
as if written

by the rain,
or the days the leaves

began to spell winter’s
long erasure.

How only after months
when the snow melts

to reveal what one
forgets.

And in June,
the sea roses 

bloomed.
I caught your scent.

To live with absence
and how it lessens,

what I gleamed
decades later

when you let me lean 
into the nape 

of your neck.
I found the shore

I had traveled 
so far towards—