Jacaranda Kiss

An empty church in my heart and home
my ears too disillusioned to hear the choir.
"Lonely" doesn't do justice to this sorrow
causing my chest to implode.
Others mean well and they think they knew you
calling me to say, "You still have her memories."
Memories indeed, they're what's nursing this pain;
my fondest was late last spring.

I remember because the jacarandas
were just beginning to bloom.
A purple blossom danced through
the wind and into your auburn hair.
I recall thinking that this was the first
time I ever really noticed you.
Thirty-seven years after our wedding kiss and I was
just now seeing you the way the good Lord intended.
Maybe it was only because I knew the truth:
it would be our last spring together.
Standing there I recalled the very first time I ever met you,
fresh from the pool, water glistening on your bosom.
The bikini exposed my desire that was merely schoolboy lust,
a towel wrapped you like a gift and left the rest to my imagination.
Last spring was different, all of time in a freezeframe,
all the earth's nuances calling exclusively to me.
Every trumpet-shaped floret in those violet clusters and
your beauty were secrets that God shared with me alone.
As that flower made its slow artistic decent,
I breathed you both in: nature's duet of woman and flower.
Your favorite necklace, a mother-of-pearl,
drew my attention to your bewitching decolletage.
A stunning contrast, your brown skin and a pink asymmetrical heart
dangling there like the grim truth of your diagnosis.
I was drawn to where the heart pointed,
even as a teenager I had never been so aroused.
For me the breasts that nursed four children held more wonder
than those that first caught my eye as many decades ago.
But, more than that, your eyes,
I had somehow taken them for granted.
Not brown, no something more, a color I had never seen,
windows into the soul that had accepted me like no other.
A pure shade that told of every kind deed you ever
performed for this undeserving fool.
Your smile in all its crooked perfection
revealed a confidence I had neglected to appreciate.
Ironic that you were more alive now than ever;
that realization signaled the beginning of my undoing.
As I leaned to remove that blossom
from your hair, your lips met me there.
Everything I had know about love
changed in that one moment.

And they speak of memories
as if they bring comfort!
I've been severed from my past
and robbed of a future.
Recollections were meant to be shared, but
nobody was with us under Christ's thicket last May.
In our room your photographs haunt me;
outside the trees root for my ruin.
Their floral displays no longer usher in summer;
instead, they just taunt me.
They whisper, "Love is gone"
repeatedly.
A chorus of "Winter is eternal"
arrives with their efflorescence.
I agree with them
and join their refrain.
Alone I freeze
in this bed so cold.
My miserable wail is the bellowing hymn
in the sanctuary of the mournful.
Damn that jacaranda kiss

--Shenandoah Lynd