Accumbent amongst the rhododendrons and magnolias is an older woman, sprawled with the laxness of death about a blanket, bared face up, drenched in wobbling columns of light and shade cast about by the random whims of the wind. The sky is watching down like a glacial lake wimpled with a floe of flower petals. I am sitting across the expanse of rooted, damp earth, my own head back and presented in full to the day. Our nostrils are laved with the scent of honeysuckle and cherry blossom. We are reveling in the day, oblivious to the other body, ensconced in our singular pleasure, until finally, moved by some ephemeral gust, she props up, squints one eye, and asks me, “Isn’t this heaven?” I want to say, “No, this is Swarthmore,” but her sentiment is genuine, and it’s rare to encounter such vulnerability in a person you hardly know but for sharing a few feet of the spring bliss this world affords us once a rotation. “Sure is,” I say, before falling back under the sun and the boughs of flowers, content to loll about, languid as a dog, with this woman of kindred wonder.

~

The girl poet is standing with her ankles crossed and touched, growing moist with this first warmth. She is nodding and perfecting her adult mannerisms, trying on the clothes for an hour or so, temporarily surmounting this small acclivity. From afar, she looks amongst peers. But up close, she has doubled back down the incline, a girl on a sled and bundled in the swaths of adolescence. Her face is a sun bleached swale of rubies, her eyes like topaz not yet cut and set by adulthood.

~

Your mother walks down the sidewalk, sees me laughing and holding a book, smiling in the rose dusk light. I see her, walking with the same purposeful, almost masculine gait as you. There’s an unreality now to it, to you and to me and all these things now gone by. Here, this woman who shielded you and loathed me for my lack of grace, for loving you too much, strolls forward and I think someday it will be you, walking towards the man who has broken your daughter‘s heart, head aflame and wondering what to do. But your mother and I feel some tug from the far distant past, which is still hurtling quietly away like a rock sinking beneath a moving river, and it pulls us into sympathetic smiles. (here, film would be a better medium so you could see the melancholy falls of our bodies, how we regret your wayward and damaged heart, and how you and I are no longer precocious in a gown and tuxedo; how we lament our overabundant souls that bulge with too much love. But mostly, we regret that I was not a better man, yet here I am smiling like a child unencumbered by knowledge of my failures, and she thinks, maybe he has learned, and I think, maybe I have learned, but neither of us can quite know) Your mother and I stand, looking to the world like two almost strangers exchanging observations about today’s beautiful blossoming, and realize we’ve become peers: we’ve let you go against our will, to face your life without us, and now, left behind, we miss you.