You come to me in a dream.
Which you often do, now that it’s the only place we speak.
‘Somehow we got it all wrong,’ I say.
‘How?’
‘The timing. Our ages. We should have waited. We wasted our beauty too soon. If only we’d been patient.’
‘It doesn’t work like that. You can’t store beauty away, or tell it to wait. You take it when it’s offered, or it vanishes.’
‘But now this absence. And the wounds, and failure.’
We are in a field swept over by wind, and wildflowers coming up.
‘I should have understood better,’ I say. ‘I held on too tightly.’
‘Call it a casualty of your age.’
‘I’ll never be new to you again.’
‘No. You’ll always be old. The oldest love. The oldest one to fail me.’
Beneath the flowers are bodies, the soft earth burying them, bearing spring in fresh color.

I wake up to rain.
Spend all afternoon in bed, listening to the storm come off the sea,
the thunder reverberating in the mountains.