I like to remember you young, glowing aurulent, the sun reflecting off you the way wine travels through itself in a glass filled with ice cubes, thick, velvety strings that move like lava inside their blushing light, your soft edges like floating tendrils that fall onto the eye and can’t be looked at directly but are still seen–I loved you. I loved you the way the sun loved you, the way it could never get enough of you, longed to hold you in a sea of boundless golden light until you became light. In an older sun I call out to you, watch you run to me, joy-filled, my own joy brimming until it spills over into the place where there is not a care or worry about when you’ll be gone. I like to stop time there, in the endless summer of you, your warmth in such overabundance that I can almost take you for granted. I do, because I am human, and you are still so alive. I imagine now that there is light in a place we can’t see, but you’re there, all of you light, seeping gently down into bone, into ash, carried through your scattered earth, resting everywhere, infinitely golden. When we call out to you, you hear us. You build a bed for us, a nest of river birches, dry and warm and deep as saffron and we lie there with you, an imagined heaven made real.
