Edge Of The Ceramic-Rimmed-Potted Earth

your hardcover copy of Love in the Time of Cholera

rests on my nightstand like your bones

rest in peace  wrapped in the soil of our homeland 

i replant the daisies you left me—to remember our disappeared & our migration story—into a ceramic pot     made from the earth i now call home 

on my blistering kitchen windowsill, i place our flowered history         by the corner

where daddy longlegs tangle their thin translucent webs 

sunbeams seep through the finger-marked glass pane & long-limbed shadows point to a past

                                                                                   buried

at the back of the mind

rammed—at the edge 

of the ceramic-rimmed-potted earth

i watch your daisies find the waking sun 

i watch the daddies find their home soil

& i shy smile as 

they tumbleweed their threadlike legs towards the ring of raylike petals

open-faced

open-armed

a match made by us 

sunlight spins with the rotation of the earth orienting my mind

into the pinkish glow of Venus’ Girdle 

drawing strings of thought—tightly squeezed, like a bud—one that when blooms…

takes

breath

away

but i smell you—beside me as fragrant & as flamboyant as your daisies 

death does not do us part

death has nothing to do with us

& i drink your scent like Florentino Ariza drank perfume & ate gardenias to try to taste 

his amor Fermina Daza once more