sunset song

The dust danced as the light dappled on and off, the strobe of sun and leaf, the glamour of wind and shine. The sun lingered, adrift in a polished blue sky. The sun lingered, squandering its grace as it might. The ache was that absence of romance, that rend along the mend of mind and hunger. The ache that was the settling of sun and horizon, a pornography known once seen. The afternoon caught in the tow of easy mystery, the daze of  nostalgia, the life long wake of that murdered romance. The music starts, the memory fails.

I gave up the last two boxes, the dusty entangling of notes and letters, diaries and roughed out poems. The last of those clung to love letters, the years of untossed notebooks and delusions of squalor. No more mementos, no more clutters of kisses and fantastic wants. The smudges and the scrawls I thought to gift to the lost tomorrows. The odd death cult some of us harbor in the husk of our dreams. Always the fire and the offering, the tumbled dice and the yawning road. Further rather than farther every time.

It is always some flavor of you. Some made-up prayer along a fence cluttered with spies, some half remembered moment of shadow devouring your skin. A tide of night and longing, a sketching of certainty and a glut of appetite. Somehow always in the air, somehow always on my lips. The inevitable correction of every wander, the wonder of you all I want. Every day the altar burns down  to nothing but a sweep of stars. Every day this same lapse of ash and cinder, smoke trailing away into a habitual tune.