You, Therefore BY REGINALD SHEPHERD

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:

if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch:

you are a concordance of person, number, voice, and place, strawberries spread through your name as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me of some spring, the waters as cool and clear (late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:

and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star in the meadow sky,
the snow still arriving from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, when there was snow), you are my right, have come to be my night (your body takes on the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep becomes you):

and you fall from the sky with several flowers, words spill from your mouth in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees and seas have flown away, I call it loving you):

home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name.