green for blue

I never knew those eyes were green when they would stare right through me, color blindness being the least of my afflictions. I mistook them for blue, bright and shining, lucid in the deepest portions of oblivion, kind even in the inferno of too much feeling left. It wasn't caution I ever erred beside, it wasn't that the heart would ever know the limits it lacked. I wrote you into my poems and dreams, wrote you into the fevers that inevitably overwhelmed my flesh. It was a kind of erasure, replacing you with shiny words. An exchange of prosthetic beauty at the price of enduring the honest kind. It was an equation I always worked, against the bone and blood of what I wanted most. Against the crosses bourn and promises extinguished, drenched in salt and water.

The poetry has long since crept through me, living only after-hours and transcribed poorly upon scant lines. The fires that found you have smothered in so much earthly weight and earnest time. Smoke and ash, the useless crucible of sanctity gained through the extrusion of time from flesh. Eyes that change color constantly, always dull and translucent, only seeing clearly that furthest distance from the greedy self. Seeing that surpasses belief in every solitary way. Words expose even this hollowness, trying to find your hallowed heart.

Love letters become leaf and ash, the futile compost for the next budding true love blooms. Faces lined with the knowing are lost to those carrying the fevers of faith, the touch of gray the warning sign for all the truth youth can not yet face. The work of the world, career and home and family. The burden of human connection that last beauty that exceeds and eludes me, that passage into mortal meaning, filial continuity. I labor lightly, the witness, the placeholder. The hard measure meant for pitiable times. My dry hands ache and fold, empty save for grasping. Seeing your green eyes still blue, holding that place open, the wound that never heals. The door I could never step through.