Old Journal

When the tired back bends, book butterflies

and writing stretches out cross parted sheets

in lines that reach towards the cresting rise,

the shore of words where language ends and meets

its binding on a half-inch beach. There caught

within the folded valley of the spine,

a fallen lash that isn’t mine. I brought

this journal down to read and realign

the present with the long departed past,

but here a piece of you recalls our lives

entwined, ossified, fractured, now recast

by a fallen crescent of dead cells that drives

the memory of a time together spent

and your absence, which I do not lament.