I wake to the smell of fresh dough and cinnamon,
to day’s first light through an eyebrow dormer.
The comforter piles like a cloud by my feet.
When I stretch my arms toward the ceiling’s peak
they miraculously rise without aches, as if winged.

Belle lies beside me, asleep. Her shoulders
glow pink above the champagne-colored sheet,
and her hands lie one on top of the other,
ring finger up. Her blonde hair shines like a halo.

In the hallways, doors open and then click shut;
footsteps ring down the inn’s oaken stairs.
Everything sounds so far away. Belle’s eyelids
flutter, and I wonder what she’s dreaming.
Perhaps the walk arm-in-arm, from sitting room
to parlor; of the piano and its processional,
the I wills and I dos, the kiss, the familiar faces
as we floated into the garden, where her son,
now grown, gave his toast.

			second blooming...
			the roses hold
			a last touch of sun

I lie as if hovering and watch the daylight grow into
itself, the air deepening with that fresh, sweet scent.
Through the dormer, a wingtip brushes the sky,
as if to say, C’mon, C’mon...

In good time, I think, as I turn toward Belle and fall
into us, as if we had always been there.

			late-life love...
			letting the sun
			inch over our skin

Rich Youmans

An editor and publisher by profession, Rich Youmans serves as Associate Director of Calliope: Poetry for Community, and also oversees the communications of a U.S. trade association representing jewelry designers and manufacturers. He and his wife, Belle, live on Cape Cod.

His haiku, haibun, and related essays have appeared internationally in journals and anthologies, including Modern Haiku, Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun, KYSO Flash, and Journeys 2017: An Anthology of International Haibun. His latest collection, All the Windows Lit, was a 2015 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award winner and was published in July 2017. He is co-author with Maggie Chula of a collection of linked haibun, Shadow Lines (Katsura Press, 1999), which won a Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America; and co-editor with Frank Finale of Under a Gull’s Wing: Poems and Photographs of the Jersey Shore (Down on the Shore Publishing, 1996).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Youmans reads his poem Alignments: A Haibun, published in WCAI: Local NPR for the Cape, Coast & Islands (7 May 2017).