hallowed

Maybe I will light a candle. Maybe I will cast a spell. Clinging to the tangled smoke, kicking every tire. See it before it slips away, say it for the blood in your breath. We walk the high path above the precipice, we linger on the details, house of stars and luck of number. We watch our step and count out blessings, the sediment of sentiment, the mantle of the ancestors. I speak your name when I at last surrender, for there is nothing so true and treacherous as the heart. Though you wear sky and moon upon your brow, I name you among my missing. I visit you among the dead as the night rises.

How the old bones travel. How the light persists, the flicker of a candle, the downhill slide of every shine. As still as stone each ghost in motion, the caress of the shadows adrift in obliging brightness as it canters and trots. We open these well worn trails in the strobe of remembered sun, and the treasured touch of warm hands long after the power and the heat got turned off. Time strides through us as we send our whims rippling in all directions, intent and instance slipping off shoes and swapping skins. The holes long torn through yesterday and tomorrow. Open mouthed kisses between the living and the lost.

It isn’t that your charms elude me. It isn’t that your enchantments have gone soft. I am seized with the immediacy of my intentions, your light in my mind wild kisses and tangled limbs. I follow the carnal hungers through realms bereft of heft and flesh, burning each attachment into me like a brand. A face at the window chasing a train as it pulls away, your face fixed upon your destination, never even giving this keening a glance. We move on as our dead are settling, our courses continue on against the angle of our loss. Tomorrow ahead of the itinerary, eyes set firmly on the opening road. And so all velocities are holy. And so all love is ghosts.