You are not mine to give back.
No fact to be debated, or denied.
You were a sketch of carbon, once
upon one point in time, edged
with water into nucleotides —
an improbable reaction of chaos
to itself, a chemical compound
that made your own means to laugh
and tear at other impossibilities
with your teeth. You were too complete
as the arrangement that we agree
to call being alive, too much yourself
to belong even to the elements
you’ve broken back into — not mine
to give back any more than to claim
one drop as my own back out of the sea
that holds your ash. Once upon one point
in time you gave me a handful of rain,
and pressed with all your heat into me
an arrangement that in so many places
and times before us had so many other names.
I thought that day it was only you,
but the sea has made so much rain before
us both, and will make so much more anew.
April 2011