Maybe it’s as easy as this: knowing she will always be there when you come home. That she won’t have gone away, even thought going away was a place she could go to. And that she’ll know you will always come home, and she will look up from whatever she’s doing, or come from some inner room, to welcome you in as if it’s the first time you put the key in the door. The porch light an oasis she knows you will find, and her as palm tree swaying shade, cool water deep in her hands, livestock bedded down for the night, the story of stars soon to be within reach all over her, all over the sky.
Robert Harlow resides in upstate NY. He is the author of Places Near and Far (Louisiana Literature, 2018). His poems appear in Poetry Northwest, RHINO, Cottonwood, The Midwest Quarterly, and elsewhere. Or so he has been led to believe.
