It will start as the sort of
love poem
you know by heart, with the
young
couple waist-deep in the
ocean, en-
twined, and then work its way
around
to a day at the park, throwing
frisbees to their corgis and
kids. Then,
not unexpectedly—you will have seen
it coming—the requisite scene
of vitriol
and recrimination. All you
will need
are a few details about who
was found
in whose pickup truck doing
what
with whom, and you could write
the lines yourself. Where the
poem
takes a turn, however, is when
we see
the man, years later, walking
in a forest
as if he knows it like the
back of his hand,
kneeling to see the tiny vines
of blue-
eyed marys growing alongside
the trail,
when all at once a great
horned owl rises,
so close the man’s hoary heart
nearly
breaks in his chest, beating
like wings.(first published in Black Fox Literary Magazine, 2017)
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