“And sentiment, fruitless as dust in cupped hands”

And    
     is so very inclusive. A knotted ampersand
     joined up in a glyph,  like the also you of me.
     Trailing that sense of the furthermore, a dreamer's                                   

sentiment
      out from the soul's depths. At times a shallow ripple
      a belief it's just fast food for valentines on the go.
      I keepsake you still in 3-D though any sense of we is
                                   
fruitless.     
     In this very singular afterlife, the point is taken, 
     a cornucopia mostly empty, trees quite often bare.
     But these winters have had the plumiest blues
                            
as
     what? What shall I liken them to? Those eyes
     from a Cossack genepool, still with a hint of pillage?
      Since then you've passed, in the way that

dust
     settles after footfalls across forsaken floors. I dredge 
     imagery, pluck memory specks from air. Smutty fragments
     went with your ashes clean out to sea. Here I remain

in
     love of sorts, with a rakish ghost What matters most
     is within,  interiors that can shut out the dark, since fatalism
     has become so fashionable.  There's a shell

cupped
     to my ear for listening to the rub of tides over stone.
    Its a concave bell, a breathing sea exhaling ozone
    for our inspiration. Holding me hollow without

hands. 
     And so I help others picking over tidelines. 
     We write our names at the waters edge and clap
     each one that's washed away. A passing ovation.

Epigraph line from my poem “My Move“, unbundled as acrostic alongside the word definitions and associations for my MTB prompt: Taking a Fine Line Down