Life in Retrospect

on the horizon light would shimmer once
the sun had sunk into the tropic sea.

youngling I did not yet know the twilight

entwining of light and dark nor know yet

the feel of that birthmark above her hip.

the seduction of so light a period

on the smooth perfection of her skin

made me shiver with desire with lust

to wind my body with hers in sensual

similitude of what the sunset taught

lingering in that higher latitude

souls eternal interpenetrating

as if night would never cut off the light.

more apt the sudden dark in tropic falls

of night that did not linger the moment

so I knew the loss was loss the past gone

irretrievable like the birthmark now

gone but for the finger's remembering

the punctuated smoothness of her back

so long untwined that now the sense recedes

all drowned in an abyss of forgetting

certain only that the flash of passion

darkens even as the senses note it

and desire turns to sad nostalgia

for a past that every day slides further

into the dark backward of oblivion.