by Ron Clinton Smith (June 2026)
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For Sue I Saw Dancing in the White Sun Dress
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I am that boy you saw grinning toward you through the crowd
You are that girl I saw dancing in the light
I thought I could cherish, knowing nothing about you
But a vision, a gift, my broken heart healed in your smile
And told you, knew you, claimed you and arrested you
To be mine without reason or explanation
For what is given us as love like the promise of
Endless spring, a day that shines on forever
Breaking both of our hearts, wedding our pain and fears
Bonding us like spirits known in the spheres of stars
And who am I to deserve such truth in beauty of love
At my touch, giving up everything you are for who I
Had to be, loving my love for you like the day without end
And all these years, many years, all this life I’m blessed
And shattered with love, devoting my pain and pleasure
To the sweet kindness and angry offense of love
Of tears and blessings, and children and the strange
Mysterious beauty of becoming your only one,
My only one, the one who took me into her flesh
And let me find myself in your life, heart, secrets,
Our spirits so intertwined I would never know
Where I begin and you and I end, because.
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Forgive Me if All I Have
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Love takes everything the face will allow
shifting moon shadows from dawn
with the elliptical void of heart and fist
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The back-bending gross awareness of
nearness, the soft undoing of skin on the
mantle, for where I leave you are there
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Inside us, taking on a universe of life,
the chemistry of our brains unwinding
in our thoughts, our brash, false movements
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Electric with loss, dancing back across the
threshold of our wandering fits. You don’t
have to ask where I came from when you
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Know you made me, unraveled me like a
spool of satin, and crossed, crosshatched
me woven upon a dreamscape, unveiled
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My sight for your own time and pleasure.
Excuse me while I reach across and take
your face like a lantern and live again in
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Your opened windowed light, forgive me if
all I have is you and the dawn and the
world made of you and the softest skin.
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Unfinished
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If I had seven arms
and three or four hearts
or more, I couldn’t touch you
enough to never need to
or keep one heart from breaking
for every inch you smiled.
I would always be appearing
at your door with something
left unfinished”
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Our Beginning
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And then I was lying there
In the dawn
At the beginning,
At the end
Touching the light
Slipping quickly into
The first thought, the
Opening door into the
Word walking fast across
The floor in the dark
I was standing and you
Were there with me
Without knowing why I’d
Called you, straddling my
Heart across the well worn
Shadows that gleaned a
Meaning, to leap up and
Cross the opening, the door
Way of my birth, you were
There, but we came together
Like two known objects, fast
Working into our past, grasping
Each other like ready slaves,
Dancing in each other’s void,
Warm with the witness of
Passion, unburdened, warm
In each other’s eyes, meeting
And becoming our beginning.
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