You can call this being haunted,
The hold our homelessness maintains,
In the water tower shadows,
Redolent as any abode in afternoon,
Welcoming as any God.
Or is it something we never recovered from?
That invaded our emptiness,
Stayed in the walls,
To be inflamed by a certain shade of blue,
The way a creeper grows.
Whatever we live
Has been lived through for us
By some nostalgic presence
For what is merely a glimpse
Of the elysium we used to know,
That held us as a law of love
And let us go, because we wanted it,
Here, with the familiar strange
Because we need to melt again, like the leaves in sun
In what we already know, that escapes recall.
We can only see what we have lost,
What we recognize from the first:
The streetlights shaped like candles,
The pink trees of another world
Descending at this moment, just for you.
