In the ghostly consummate hour
when your body’s next to mine
we rest as tree and troubled vine
mulling the likely horror
 
of never having found each other.
Never finding happens all the time.
In the ghostly consummate hour
I like your body next to mine.
 
The lost years will never be ours
but we won’t dwell on that. We’ll find
our autumn as gold as springtime.
We’ll live like bees in flowers
at home in our consummate hours.

Lynn Levin‘s most recent poetry collection, The Minor Virtues, islisted as one of Spring 2020’s best books by The Philadelphia Inquirer.  Her previous collections include Miss Plastique, Fair Creatures of an Hour, and Imaginarium. She is the translator, from the Spanish, of Birds on the Kiswar Tree by Odi Gonzales and co-author of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, Artful Dodge, on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and other places. Her website is lynnlevinpoet.com