Everything Is Mostly the Same for This Time of Year

A slender, ripening air. Telling the minutes by the earliness of sounds. 

This morning’s metaphor nearly absent
as if I were still asleep.

Windows dark. No one here’s awake.

The unpetaling gardenia my father planted three summers ago blooms
again. Seeing her, but not knowing an old lover  

is just particles the sunlight passes through.

You know you’ve been gone. Already
you know the land that tugs you 

east, towards a once-known home’s summer
draw of this land for that one

cool, composed, and pressured.
A math made of light and loss.

Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash.