Poetry by Shigé Clark

He said love resides in memory.
I suppose
it can exist in afterglows,
in glass-pressed pictures tinted rose,
and how the heart holds
the mark of a strike
far longer than our simple skin,
how it can keep a moment sinking in.

I guess the scents and touches
linger after.
The tumbling of your laughter
across the grass, the past—fast-fading
flash of light—
the weight of you inside my arms,
our foreheads pressed together,
how you
never shrank from adoration
or ever met my kiss with indignation.

I suppose it has some merit,
all the dreams
we stuff inside each other, straining seams
and scribble-scripting words into the reams
of all our stories, to make some sense
of things that fail and fall from present tense.

I guess love cares for memories,
if even one
can carry them until the road is done,
can bear them underneath the heat, and run
the race—perhaps alone.
Too often it all falls to one to own.

But I have watched how memory
gathers rust,
how time can grind its finer points to dust,
and leave it brittle under winter’s gust.
And I think more, by now, that love is this:
the thing soft-sighing when the memories twist
and decompose to sorrow,
“Yet, you will find me here again tomorrow.”