Previous Love by Keith Althaus

Previous love
think of blue sky
above us still,
the parade
of clouds here,
the starlit evening
there, and this one
breath expelled
that you might
catch someday
on a street corner
after its long journey
across miles of ocean,
fields, and woods
that comb it,
take out the scent,
the taste, the sweet
stuff, until
there’s nothing left
of me or this place,
or just enough
to make you think,
standing on the curb,
waiting for the light,
of me, and us.

First Published in Sun Magazine (2011). Reprinted with permission by the author.

Keith Althaus is the author of three poetry collections, Cold Storage (Grid Books, 2016), Ladder of Hours (Ausable Press, 2005), though later subsumed by Copper Canyon, and Rival Heavens (Provincetown Arts Press, 1993). He has received a Pushcart Prize as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Foundation of the Arts. In 1969 he was one of the first Writing Fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He lives on Cape Cod with his wife, the artist Susan Baker.