A POEM A DAY

With thanks to Evita Tezeno, Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You” and Sofia

No one else makes me feel the colors that you bring me
is the title of the painting before me
on my birthday.
A husband holds his wife in the kitchen of their life,
and the color of their love brings me to my knees like a
proposal
I prepared for over and over for months.
The gallery is full of exhibits invoking love languages
and I think of all the languages I want to tell you love you
and the only two I know now.
Any love poem I write for you sometimes feels like a love poem for Houston.
It is my wife Adela’s birthday too.
Adela wears blue crescent moon earrings
I remember her buying years ago.
Sitting on the patio of Tiny Boxwood’s,
the song Blue Moon croons through the morning breeze
Joaquin wishes me a happy birthday and tells me
his peach tree waited to blossom for me, assuring
This is a good omen
A chocolate croissant kisses my lips then my love’s
This is a good omen
Adela sees an orange bellied robin descend
and run along the ground until its wings woke up
This is a good omen
How to measure what tethers us to tenderness?

We are looking for elephants from the Great Elephant Migration: A Coexistence Story
in the middle of Hermann Park, walking past the Oak Trees
where I kissed Adela years before for engagement photos
On the way to see the elephants, we run into
a woman who is also looking for the elephants
I see a sign about the Migration of Love and think
what is love if not movement between two places?
What is grief but the refusal of love to migrate to the great beyond?

The woman is named Sofia
Sofia offers to take our pictures under the pink rose arch
inside the McGovern Centennial Gardens
we pass on the way to see the elephants we’ve never seen before,
when suddenly, Sofia asks, do we know where the elephants are?
And her path becomes our path
She tells us, it is her birthday today
And her path becomes our path
She confides, her husband died three years ago,
and if she talks too much about it,
she will start to cry
And her path becomes our path
Sofia was kind and warm, wandering and alone
until she found us too
her grief, migrating to love
our love, migrating to love
The three of us moving together
on our birthday, alive under the sky
coexisting
with love and grief
as the candles on our cake.