The meadows near God’s country
stretched out along cold asphalt
to Toledo, where we caught a bus,
where a mill burned twenty years before.

If the car won’t run, I’ll walk
in all these backward directions,
moving deeper into the deaf night
before stumbling through seasons clamoring
to be remembered outside the rain. 

Still you wrote me poems, pictures
I had never heard, floating on your breath 
as it charged the cool of April 
and your hand trembled like a tree, 
finding justice in the leaves that had fallen.

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