that grim beauty

There’s nothing to be done. It seems that everyday lately it is spring, with summer soon to follow. The days stretch and gather what they may. Rosebuds or aphids, bullet shells and bodily wounds. The chill that slowed the seepage is gone, and all manner of beasts and fevers are awake and hungry. There is beauty, though there is always beauty, it still cleaves and whispers. Beauty with all its simple equivalencies and stealthy lies. Beauty with all its aches and mirror, leaving splinters in the seeing. Wounding and wedding every eye.

Sunlight paints with that broad brush, reflecting each given bandwidth, throwing shadows into the dust. The mind wanders, caught in reflection or revelry. We lose ourselves in skins and the slow burn of memory, all the pretty horses, all our forever loves. The press of a picture against reason, that kiss that steals the senses, filling the cradles with the changeling creatures of want and recollection. Imperfect phrasing and those eyes that lock the heart in half-imagined cages. I see her face in the crowd of past tense, feel her touch linger in long lost flesh. It is a turn of tides, a trick of the light. Beauty always takes its cut off the top, leaving the rest to mayhem and chagrin.

There is a light that always hint of her smile, a blue in the sky like the bright in her eye. There is a song written in the wind that always suggests her voice caught in the trees. The world turns over and over, but it never seems to start. Instead there is all this dirt and all these seasons. Instead there are ten thousand beauties that are never her. Wounds mend, bones knit. The birds sing up a storm, and the tide comes calling all the beaches and the boats. There are poems made of mistaken moments, poems made like the nests of wasps, chewed up leaves and mouthfuls of mud. These words chase their tails and spin their stories, aching for that grim beauty devoured in our youths.