Pretend, while sharing this page with me,
that what’s left of your time
is a jigsaw puzzle
It’s not new, but it’s yours
It came from ‘Goodwill’ with a note
of good will by the previous owner
That note says, “Beautiful,
but missing some pieces.”
Nothing makes the broad view of it obvious
As you begin working it, you worry that
this is more than one puzzle
Perhaps it’s actually the ugly and unwanted
makings of a hundred incomplete scenes
You seek out the border bits
till it’s obvious, how increasingly futile
it is to chase those straight lines
within these curvy waves
So you begin flipping each piece
face-up upon the table
You work through the edge, but the theme
continues to elude you
It is here where most put the puzzle away
Better to watch the wind whip and carry you
than to wrestle through a revelation,
or so the unremembered stories go
Who wants to scrub a muddy mirror
when there’s a window inside their cell?
Well, as it happens, you do; as do I
Slowly matching colors and textures,
the interior takes full-flowered root
You get so lost in the coupling details
that you don’t think to look at the image
you’re busy building
And as the final pieces fall with haste
into place,
fear of an ending keeps you wishing
in vain for slow motion
As to the ending, that’s a surprise no one can spoil
Some of us find nothing more than
the good will which was promised
Some lose the timed fight with candlelight
before the last matches make
Others are happy to feel the outline of their labor,
even if their eyes no longer stand a chance
of seeing the concept they’ve constructed
Personally, I continue to hope
that there are no missing pieces
And I trust in this hope because you
made me feel whole a long time ago
Together, we may yet discover that we’ve
time enough for two puzzles
May the next be a blank canvas
upon which we can paint our chosen need
for one another
May we find that our note to the future
reads of missing pieces because we
are no longer there, teaching the puzzles
how to be beautiful
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