Your Place and Mine


       In the breezy morning 
       the rocker on the porch
       canters back and forth 
       of its own accord.
       That is the chair 
       that held me so well
       when the sun pressed 
       warm against your house
       and heated the clapboard
       into almost noon.

       And after noon shades
       in your lingering hall
       are simpler now.
       Sound, too,
       no longer weaves as one 
       the voices of me and you.

       At dusk
       frogs circle in song,
       their voices swell from the gully.
       As the sun loses his way in the trees
       and the moon starts combing back the wheat,
       there is one less heart 
       to syncopate with their courting ...

       or a different heart, I think,
       of one who pipes a kinder tune,
       one who makes that rocker move,
       morning, noon, evening,
       no matter what the wind may do.




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