She was a Mimosa.
She was spirited, ardent
A girl of Ann Arbor.
Freckles like the map of Romania.
A fever to the health around her.

Her religion,
an heirloom of hope entwined
in years of tragedy
and hereditary travesty of
connection.

A boy with sharp features,
a flea-bitten apartment,
a bookshelf of Tolstoy and Kahlil Gibran.
A canvas by a white window,
her hands stippled with paint.
Not red, not blue, not yellow.
Only Crimson,
Cerulean,
Creamy Daffodil.

Dietary restrictions,
overturned ashtrays
glacial days,
summer sangrias.
"Boy I'm feeling fine."

A boy with sharp features,
wrote letters like back-shelved novels,
to a hospital in Baltimore.
One hundred words or less.

She clawed for solid ground.
She remained a cluster of fog
like ghosts swimming
over a pool
designed and purposed
for pools of sunlight.
But she is the cloud of dust now,
no longer the vivid smoke of a flaming Camel.
She is the ash, the embers, the debris,
crumbling with one gentle handle,
disintegrating onto the pages of a book
she once read with fidelity.

The last candle was blown out
like a haunting whisper.
A silent drop in the room's clarity.
The temper,
the hot flickering temper in the air,
once like a fiery affection,
now a widow dressed in black,
sitting by the window waiting
for the ghost of her love;
A widow frozen in dry ice.