Eclipses Are For Poetry
Really every day should be, but let's mark the occasion with an old poem that I recently uncovered, a love poem written for my muse.
I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t having a secret conversation with someone that I had dreamed up. I’m an only child so imaginary friends were a thing, but it’s something more than that. I began to notice that most of my stories contained a recurring character and certain features grabbed me when I stared at art.
On the plane as I traveled the last time to Turkey something happened mid-flight where I became convinced that I was being hugged from behind. It felt like arms enfolding me. My first thought was — the plane is going to crash. And then it happened again and again throughout my life, this sense — usually before a big event — that I was being supported from behind, enveloped in warm wings.
Guardian angel? Muse? Both? Does it matter?
Eventually I gave him a name and put my pen in his hand.
This is my love poem to him. I thank him for his service because I’m a notoriously tough case and if muses roll their eyes, mine’s probably caught in a perpetual state of exasperation.
But sometimes I make him laugh and often we cry together and throughout it all, he has helped me order shadows into light and peer behind the veil into mystery.
If he were a horse, he would be Choo or Bentley: dark, mysterious, and patient.
Always Here
Night jasmine in your hair, sweet watcher decades peering. I sense your coming when nights mix heat and chill, pairing seasons, the early blooms sighing shape like the mountain’s back, blue formed, binding. You gift me with rainfall, blight etching dampness tuning my hearing, sharpening my ink. A waking ache sliding leaf-like down the dew-damp window. You are a page heavy with night’s curtain. There are vacant counts of miniscule hope, un-time when I believe in you like the zealots assurance of her own salvation, sacrifice bought sealed in hot stone. I imagine you waiting rag-clothed, smelling of rich spice in the center of some rambling collection of all the farmhouses I have ever desired, land-lusting, cleaving the red dirt to claim some acre for myself. It is never enough. I find you instead, wood-tasting, caught lightly in a pencil’s shavings, in the space before the sentence ends. Your long fingers lace lightly near my palm, if seasons have fingers, if folktales spread like ferns growing near the churning river’s current. You have broken god-sworn oaths muttered stage-style before a priest. You have dirtied the hem of hand-woven lace. With joy you have allowed me to blame you. For in proving your fiction, I have seen you made flesh – have trotted the oak shaded pathways of a vestal calling, of what I once coined my coldest fear, to simply find you standing at the mouth of the path, dark eyes closing, warm arms folding your robes smelling of juniper and ink. You have tutor-taught me this lesson: that there is no outline. That will rises suddenly in courses beyond the foot-tested pool of panic. That loves needs no bone held object. Sweet scented hair grown long by finger’s trickery, writing. Purple welts raised by words, flowing. Mouth no less tasted by sentences, finishing. The secret path leading to a beloved smiling in the forested shadow of a longing that created you still from memory. I will write the words savagely, quiet phantom, until you come.
Ah! How perfect for the shadows from today?! As always, beautiful imagery and wording. 💜