SINCE I FELL FOR YOU BY JOE

Was it her chestnut hair or the moon’s rays that leapt off in highlights after downpours in life’s gray rain? Was it the glitter drawn from youth’s eyes, or the ocean of tears shed for the days spent shackled—the suffering they once and again had witnessed? No, it was her lips, vermilion, strong-willed, sensual, and how they moved over the countless poems she murmured to keep us from knowing—She’d faded to blue, into an impassable orb, pirouetting like dust adrift in a shaft, the dance inseparable from the dancer, until the one moved too quickly—One wept. One laughed, shortly before she vanished into a furtive corner to leave behind a world blinded by the beauty of her blueness. But, for all the musing that goes on in an old man’s mind, this is how I best remember.