Let the Buyer Beware

Let the Buyer Beware

Let the buyer beware.
It was in winter
that he met you, and
shyly touched you:
frost-whitened trees, and grass,
disconsolate…
he gave you a stone,
a small flawed agate.
(“I look for them on the beach,”
he said.  “It gives me
something to do.”)
It was in spring, perhaps,
that he loved you, though
he never claimed it.
You took him
or he took you…
the definition troubled you,
at times.

It was in sered summer
that he left, still
saying nothing of love.
Weeds in the socks,
in the hose…and if
you could (somehow)
clean the heart, too?
Let the buyer beware.

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To some extent ‘he’ is a portrait of me at a certain age; the selfishness portrayed is the vision lent by hindsight, whether wise or no.  Note that who the buyer might have been and what might have been bought are markedly absent.