Your visit was enough
for the moon to fill and ebb,
giving a grace of wholeness.
Your parting was a kind sadness.
Like Shiner, your cat,
(so lavished with impromptu
touch and praise)
we breathed again entire:
renewed in each splash of red hair
and laughing toss of your head
at family jokes.

Indulging a last barrage of hugs,
you walked into the lag hours of night
onto the airport tarmac.
At the door, 
a final wave and smile,
you entered the slim silver fuselage,
a birth canal to a new world.
We watched your duffel bag and back pack
file up the luggage ramp.

When from the black sky
engines ceased their whispers,
we went to our car,
holding among us the space you left.
At the tug of a switch,
headlights reached through predawn mist
to illumine laces of dew
on a blossoming shrub.

Liquid diamonds, I thought,
soon to be vapor and memory.
Till they return.

October 1983