Moon at Half Past Noon

I came to you with a map of scars,
the kind grief etches beneath the skin—
no compass, just the whisper of tires
on backroads glazed with August rain,
the sigh of limestone catching light
in Watkins Glen’s cathedral mist.

Downtown smelled of yeast and burning leaves,
the Public Market’s peach-juice laughter,
a Garbage Plate’s greasy sacrament.
Strangers called me honey, dear—
their voices rough as cobblestones,
their eyes holding the patience of oaks.

At Mount Hope, the dead spoke in tongues of wind:
We are the soil that cradles your ache,
the rusted gate left swinging,
the dandelion breaking through granite.
I pressed my palm to marble frost,
felt the pulse of forgotten names.

By the Genesee, a Seneca elder
tucked a tobacco prayer into my palm:
Listen—the river still sings
the first words it taught us.
Your sorrow is a seed
and the land remembers how to grow.

I slept in the arms of Letchworth’s gorges,
woke to eagles stitching the sky,
their cries like needles drawing thread
through the fabric of my unspooling.
A widow at Highland Park knelt
among the lilacs, pruning shadows:
Child, even the broken
can photosynthesize light.

Now, when the highway takes me home,
I taste the ghosts of apple blossoms,
feel the drum of ancient footsteps
beneath my soles. Rochester,
you were the wound and the salt,
the hand that bled me clean.

I came to you lost.
You answered with the oldest map of all—
horizon lines drawn in river ink,
contours of a heart learning
to beat in borrowed time.

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