A Crumb

As you paused to flick away
one crumb, all you'd been saying, all
I was about to say

deserted me. I saw the tired
skin — sand creased by a flash-flood
then parched — inside

your elbow, in that place
with no particular name. Erosion,
grain by grain...I can't make

you beautiful. It frightens me,
how little we miss, so close. Not a crumb.
What do you see

and not say, that I deceive myself I hide?

What love can't do
is save us from ourselves, or from each other.
All it can do is be true.

Copyright © 2002 Philip Gross All rights reserved
from Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998
Bloodaxe Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission