I Think it Has Been 22 Years

a poem about what's lost and found

I’ve looked for you everywhere,
but maybe not everywhere.

My feet haven’t brought me
to the car, to the airport,
to the country that's finally free, and the city with porcelain tea sets thin like April river ice,
and Laima candy that I tasted just that once.

So the truth is I have looked, not 
everywhere, but at all things
within reach.

I look inside the jar of tart-sweet black currant jam,
which I can still see you pull a spoonful of the sticky fruit from. 
You stir it into a mug of steaming water
for my throat.

When I think you are lost, I make this tea for my heart
which finds no trace of your eyes in mine.

I search the pink glass gem, caged in gold,
the pendant that drew my small fingers to it like the gravity of the sun beckons comets.

My hands now are not as old 
as yours were then.

Though I find blue veins, they are difficult to trace -
they don’t run through the same landscape.

I seek the catkins, gray and soft like
your gaze
remembered - 
but spring
doesn’t sing like it used to, 
like we used to,
and I can’t hear your voice when I 
sing the songs you gave me.

So I will shadow your ghost
until enough years steal the color from my eyes,
and a child of my child wanders alongside the blue rivers in my hands,
until spring, 60 times over, takes its tithe of my voice.

Just when I think that 
I’ve looked for you everywhere
within reason,
I’ll make black currant jam tea
for my grandchild,

and
I’ll find you
once again
within reach.