I’m sorry for still loving you this way. I’m sorry for letting these
words
lunge between us the way the wind does through a tiny knot of
flame.
I’m sorry for letting them ferment the way the sun does each
night.
There’s no excuse, and yet, maybe I am not so sorry for still loving
you
this way. I don’t pay any attention to the way the filament in the
bulb
glows for only a few seconds when the light goes out. It doesn’t
matter to me that the river stores the city’s lights only to sweep them
downstream.

Sorry or not, I don’t think there is anyone left in my soul.
Therefore,
I am not so sorry for still loving you this way, the way a sunken
boat
recalls its sail. Sometimes I think the heart is a beehive someone
has
turned over. Sometimes it is a silkworm building its obscure
cocoon.
There must be a few derelict constellations with no light to show
us yet.
I’m sorry, but sometimes I also think you have created the night.
Other times I think you must have inhaled the breath of stars.

I’m sorry for loving you this way, for loving you still. Each
memory
hollowed out the way water drips for centuries through a sandstone cave.

The ambulance siren slithering away through the streets but
lingering on.
The wood frogs freezing themselves dry all winter to revive in
spring.
I’m sorry, but maybe the truest love is the most desperate. I’m
sorry.
I’m not sorry. Sometimes I think these words rot like fallen fruit,
and
sometimes I think you are the smell of rain that inhabits the air
before a storm

Richard Jackson, Prairie Schooner (Volume 81, Number 2, Summer 2007)