She breathed life to me by Carter’s mill,
beside the walk cradling the edge of the river
I didn’t know it at the time,
I was full of myself and the future and grandness
but I learned, eventually, those are illusions
created by ourselves and fostered by others
to make life more bearable
If I had known it then, perhaps …

Perhaps? No, she is lost to me,
except in my meanderings of possibilities
and those things I sometimes regret
Not the knowing, but the escape, the avoidance
I lived and questioned it,
foraging for some answer, some explanation,
accepting eventually, the acknowledgment of life

The mill has been gone for twenty years now
The river diverted for a power plant installation
Yet, that moment still lives
There is the spot, the place
There is her breath and there is me,
as I should have been, not as I was and am
He is much more real than what I have become