Her Forgotten Collected Works

-I hurry with
Translating and cementing in memory
Your flailed tears
In a well-bound edition.
They are throwaway and impetuous
Love poems beholden
to a specific absence that
I chronicled, here, for you
_________________now
to peruse. And she then from him
Took her cast off,
noble words,
Words of purity enough
To justify pilgrimage
to distant objects,
bowed in unvindicated trust
of being noted,
arrogating an immortal shred
of love.

When she reads them
again there is a harvest feast
for the crusaders, their piety proven
and manifest immaculately
in choice lines, and the lives
of the just are threaded once more
to cover heads anew
in the mourning party.