Apologies to anyone who has looked here for a poem during the Jewish holidays! But I'm back, hoping to post every Monday through Thursday...

Lover

Easy light storms in through the window, soft
edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s

nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone
to pick with whomever is in charge. All year,

I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,
Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh

in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend
writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely

excited for the word lover to come back. Come back
lover, come back to the five and dime. I could

squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover,
what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,

a need to nestle deep into the safe-keeping of sky.
I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape

of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after
us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt

and what I do not say is, I trust the world to come back.
Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned

for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sun beam,
the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.