affect

How does the mirror bear the burden of your reflection once it leaves? How does it fair having held your gaze and your features, how does it pass the time drained of that improbable perfection? How does the wish for your return ease its pain, or is it tortured in the way only objects are by the brief admission then extinction of love? Blake's fearful symmetry does not account for the metrics of the glass and the ablutions of light. That you shine is evident, weighted as you are with so many delighted eyes and abrupt attentions. This brilliance you exude marks you upon any map you loiter near. Beauty winds up a word spent of intent aimed at you. In your absence I know what the mirror is missing.

This is part profane animal rapture, the kindling of desire and that spark of passion that is love's fuel. It is also the grace of these curdled cultures built up around instinct and deception. The words that tumble are meant to win and persuade, to pursue and convince. They indulge in an alchemy that is the foundation for art and religion, the rapturous sense of excession that implies completion. It is the boundless complexities of nature, the vast cold universe seeming to twinkle in your eyes. For others it would be God and fate and the bindings of eternity. But these smoldering embers are the work of time and biology-- the wonder of the mixture of happenstance, staggering volumes of finite time, and encyclopedias of random strategies for survival. I see all my tomorrows written in your smile. It is devastating and disturbing, the pull of the sway of your spine. It is poetry and it is play, an inferno of improbable collisions and the certainties of blood.

How odd to be such strangers. How odd to never know the names and the measurements. Your beauty evades me as it compels, as my words confound and diminish exactly the mark they suppose to make. I move through the world in masks made from my own memories, emotions learned slowly in the lessons of mistakes and mirrors. You move and you are persuasion, though as to what you never know. Everyone is convinced before they know you, every intimacy an act of barren faith. And this is how faith hinges, belief despite evidence, truths despite the lack of facts. Every touch, each kiss, a step into darkness. Every mask a mystery, every mirror the proof.