After toast and eggs and talk of flying South for the spring, you see a heron rise out of the morning white fog hovering over the river. Look, you say to me at the car. That’s a blue heron. Yes. On our way back to my house where you will call your boss to say you won’t come in today, we watch five deer in a line jump the fence and cross the lane and Emerson’s Run. We don’t make love again, rather knees to knees on the still warm bed listen to the rain now praying on the tin roof, survey our pasts and the lines on our faces, a delicate curve of shoulder first noticed. Everything yes. I pause and taste each detail, like age twelve, when your mother asked you to steal your baby sister and run away from your father on the Greyhound Bus. My Goddess, I laugh, you are one of those missing grocery bag girls. Yes. Your brown eyes understand when I whisper how rarely the falling in love stage is fully lived and well performed, how we save back for fear it is not real and will not last. Does a night last, or youth, or life. Even the sun now hidden above the mist and rain is burning this rain up, and one day itself. Is thus the sun not real. Does thus the rain not last. That evening on my way to class, Survey of Romantic Lit, I rehearse my lines on William Blake: Heaven is now. Heaven is wild. A hawk swoops down in front of the car, flashes and wags its red tail within a giant’s grasp of my driver’s side window, balancing on the wind like a first prize photograph, then gliding into the woods down Emerson’s Run.
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