Archaeology

At the bottom of a shoebox

from some old pair of shoes

I’d long ago outgrown or worn out

with miles of walking through life,

I found a picture, stuck there

not by glue but by time

and moisture; the blue ink scrawled

across the back, the letters

and words now blurred together,

is barely readable by these old

bifocal-ed eyes, head tilted back

and peering down my nose,

drawing the photo closer and pushing

it away, trying to make sense

of those smears and loops and swirls.

My name, though, stood out clearly,

clear enough, and yours.

Over the years since, though, and the miles,

our love blurred, too, and our lives

went the way lives go, this way and that way,

forward, and on and on and on, and the picture

becomes an artifact of some ancient

time long forgotten, grown over

with the vines and tangles we left behind,

years of growth obscuring that age,

that time until my archeological dig

in the ruins of my own life, hacking through,

revealed a shoebox holding you and me

in a world so dissimilar. What I’d had

I’d forgotten, a simpler time of love

shared in the innocence of youth where

what mattered most was us and being

together, a couple, and the world was

conquerable outside the bubble we’d

wrapped ourselves in, but like

the Incas and the Mayas and the old

Phoenicians, that all disappeared, mysteriously,

only to be found, rediscovered, years later

at the bottom of a shoebox in blue ink

blurred on the back of a picture,

mysterious runes of what could have been

that never quite became,

ancient words of a time gone by.