A Love Letter to Emily

Amanda Yskamp

I went to your room yesterday,
saw the bed where you died,
the basket for gingerbread
you lowered to the town’s children,
the table where in one year
you penned 500 poems,
possessed by the light
that needs no fetched stars
to illuminate the way home.
If anyone’s loved you,
I have, do, with a love both pure
and ravishing, it shocks me how.
The ages don’t allow the corporal
between us, but death cannot keep
us apart. Arriving at your threshold,
I would not take you from your intense
inwardness, but mark it, harmonize,
homing on my own sidereal path.