By Daniel Reuben Barlow

She visits me in dreams. At once I feel
 
the rare ethereality of joy,
 
the pull of life that threatens to destroy,
 
with wakefulness, the place of what is real.
 
 

I’m thirty-seven, Dad to two and yet,
 
she visits. Sating dreams describe the girl
 
I knew at seventeen and if I let
 
myself, I feel the promise of us, taste
 
the sweet accord of how we used to be–
 
and never stop to wonder, if like me,
 
she’s going gray, or thick around the waist.
 

 
And I would never see that old love burn–
 
and am afraid that she will not return.