What I wouldn’t give
for another morning like that one:

I brought you Kona coffee and sunny-side-up eggs,
pausing momentarily at the bedroom door,
teak tray perched on my fingertips, to watch
you float on the rippling blue comforter,
a still life, swimming a statuesque side-stroke.
The birds in the branches outside
our bedroom window capered about in the yellow-breasted
sunlight.
The maple tree, wrapped in wet brown bark,
sprouted buds
bejeweled by last night’s fog—
the same little beads which slid down
your naked skin in the shower,
dawn after presumptive dawn.

I sip my coffee alone now, in the first anodyne rays
of the mourning hours, measuring my life
in birdsong–plaintive and palliative.

– Greg Maddigan