The day arrives an awful blur of bent shadows and dirty windows. The wind makes shapes in the shadows on the wall. I wake without warning to the absence of her call. I wonder what color I am painted if I'm never seen at all. The glories that abide in passing, the intractable kindnesses that can not endure. I cast myself against the light, blinded by it day or night.
Yet she calls, and I endure these vast slabs of sorrow, these ages of accumulated ache. Her gracious touch rings down through my bones, it sounds bells from the blue firmament. She heals the tatters of my mind with gentle kisses, holds me gently with implacable resolve. I love her past all these letters and balcony scenes, and her love is a mighty tide that carries me back to shore. It is that line from Roethke that clings to her in my mind, "she moves and I adore." She thrives in my mind like rhyme, her kisses I feel in my heart like Neruda's ocarina. She brings hope like fire to this bleak and bitter world.
Oh the ways I am defeated, oh the course of fallen stars. The spark as if the lamp of heaven, then the burning down the abyssal path. The clockwork truths at you deem clever only the wheels that turn as is their wont. The prayerbook alibis only golden in your guilty eyes. She shifts the play, she changes the balance. Would she redeem these chips and fragments, piece my heart as whole again? I love her from beneath the rubble of disaster after disaster shaped by my heavy hands. The broken roads and burned bridges, the rails that no craft will ever wright again. I love her from amid my ruins, though I am wrecked, and still less each day. I will follow her star until it is gone with heaven. Then I will follow its memory until the darkness is all.
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