Golden

I didn’t know, when we stopped to peer at owls perched in barn haylofts,

felt the overhead disturbance of wings cutting cool dusk air on the bike trail,

as I struggled to see where your finger pointed and said “look here and here”

that you ached to show me beauty in places that I could not follow you to, myopic,

the same way as you were upon waking, glasses thick as pop bottle bottoms

yet to be slung over the backs of your ears. The years peeled into our histories

with the ease of a potato peeler on thanksgiving days, when I flustered in new

kitchens, new holiday traditions that I ached to weave into a new trajectory,

the way one hopes to redirect an earth-bound meteor with a well-poised missile.

During those golden hours when time stilled, light streamed through doe ears,

breaths held in silence as we counted bunnies that grazed on our lawns,

only in this aftermath, this new life dawning can I peer at all that I’ve healed.