Lightning Pink

Your eyes in my memory are the clearest blue,

But I have proof otherwise, a picture, and friends of friends,

Your eyes are brown, and I have remembered it wrong:

The cold afternoon, so bracing that it felt like morning,

Walking with you on

Frosted-over snow, (crunch).

I loved you then, but told you otherwise,

And when it came to it, I kissed you

Struck silent, electrified

Unable to speak, not needing to.

Lightning strikes (when I’m in love).

The color of this poem is pink,

Not for love, but for the space in love’s absence,

For the lightning at sunset that paints the sky a blooming pink,

Oppressive, hot, heavy, in bed naked, panting,

Not from joy but from suffocation,

Lily-soft and strangling.

I loved you and you left me.

Lightning strikes (when I’m in pain).

The lesson I want to learn from this poem is

(in the writing of it? In the living of it?)

about courage & maybe grace,

determining how to love and when to

let you leave & how not to blame you (myself) for it.

My love of you did not consume me,

Nor was it a pleasant/unpleasant lie,

It bloomed transcendent & I honor it.

I learn to love you & love loving you & love missing you &

Love my own capacity to love, and

your blue/brown eyes do not consume me

(but nor do I forget them),

I loved you and you left me,

but what happened cannot change that

I have always been in bloom:

Lightning strikes (and it remains).