To an old friend I have come to not know:
It’s just a smile, now -
we are yellowed keys where music once bursted.

It’s not saddening (mostly) -
more like tucking a paper in your pocket and finding it after
it emerges from the wash.
(Not sad, mostly, just too late).

I will remember the stars that gazed back at us on those summer nights;
you said the moon could’ve laid them -
tiny, cosmic eggs burning holes into the darkness.
But I never liked Huckleberry Finn and you,
you were always more like Tom.

And there was constant delight busting from your eyes -
(Although I never could tell what color they were).
But your hands were always making something -
an arrowhead, a whittled stick; names carved into a birch.

I think it was your hands that must’ve weaved the
dry, blazing days and the silent, still nights in and out,
in and out.

We were cloudless skies and clear water,
we were mid-cast fishing line, and we were
freckled cutts dancing away from the current.

But the rains must’ve come and the hooks must’ve been too beautiful for us to resist,
because all you got me for my sixteenth birthday was drunk, and
all I got you for yours was a smile.

My teeth were yellow that day.