Charter and I always forget our wedding anniversary because Valentine’s Day has always served the purpose. We usually do something special, a weekend away often to a seaside town locked in winter silence or a nearby city with a museum and good restaurants. Every year my husband presents me with a most unusual handmade Valentine.
And every year I write him a love poem.
DESIRE LINES
…represent the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination
That March night when I came here
from everywhere I’d been
the snow was troweled thick as plaster
on the dark boughs and branches.
A single footpath
skirting bog and boulder, worn to roots
by a single man walking,
led me to the house, its single room.
So much has changed since then.
But the piney aisle that first described
my way home remains…
the shortcut from love’s beginning
To death’s warm and reassuring anteroom.
The path is visible even on moonless nights,
limned by a tree-lined emptiness
above me in the sky.
