To a Woman that I Love

And in the deep of thick Missouri night, your skin gleaming gold beneath the porch light and the low burning candle on the table piled with books and books and cards and books and your bent elbows and my wineglass, long since empty, flushing hot within my throat and my tight eyes as I tried to say goodbye. When at long last, I came to you, seasoaked to my knees with sand ground hard beneath my broken fingernails and filling my thin lungs, I could not say the wild fear that had driven me back west, and as the deep and thick and dark of early June swallowed up the world just past the golden porch light, eating up the unripe squash and empty coop and gravel road and wild mint and thinning moon behind the treeline that had brought the dark upon us long before the sun was down, I longed to stay.

Hannah’s, Before Leaving

Silver Gelatin Print,
Ilford HP5 film, Photographed with Honeywell