For Teresa Shuler

Expiation

Still in our teens we walked the back paths Of Overton Park, looking for a place, The cider-tart odor of crab apples Underfoot in the time of falling leaves. I am haunted a half century later by the lovely Apparition of her face, the numinous Ever-recurring almost nightly visitation That frequents my troubled sleep, defying All wakeful attempts to exorcise the memories Of what receded so long ago. It remains, That brief season that transpired in another age, And years pass, deepening with time the fallen Leaves of red and gold along lost ways that yet beguile.

Farewell

She died in the days before the autumn equinox, Twenty-five years after our short liaison Of adolescent bravura and stealth played out Along wooded trails. Caught up in the masque And pageant of the turning season, cool mornings We uttered endearments a bit too clipped For the particle vapor that issued from our lungs, Frost dispersing above the tree line pyrotechnic With color. Now she lies beneath the cold sod Of Murray, Kentucky, in a coffin once shining And upholstered like a new roadster. Pallbearers Filed past the casket at graveside, each placing On its lid a boutonniere blue as a robin’s egg. Oblivious to the untimely aneurysm, the ripe berry Of blood that burst in her brain, I slumbered as the stars Of the Milky Way wandered the disheveled clouds. Too many years since our parting had intervened; Another man’s ring encircles her desiccated finger, And Teresa, too, sleeps on a little past the dream.