It has come to the end of our days, and we
know it. It is a long fall.
Habit dictates we bring home
spiced apples and sit on the porch with coffee
through the lengthening darks, hoping
our silences will shape the hard truth for us.
But as we were together, we fall apart.
You spend your time praying
in abstractions—mercy, shame, empirical figures
on the merit of here versus there—and I walk away
into the field of dying cow corn beside our house,
sink myself deep amongst the crinkled gold-
brown husks. Wind moves through, the corn
shivers up. It is past harvest. The story goes
that God loves this world so much he gives us
October, readies our crops and sets fire to all
that's left. So the opposite of love is not-
love, is absence. All for the joy of building it
up again. But there is a burning between us
yet. Come once into this field, this fire,
where I can see you. Stand at the center. Be
as the burning taper giving shape to the flame.
A thing you can touch.