Flowering Dogwood
Droplets speckle my window for what I will not allow to decorate my cheek. I gaze through them, out from myself, across the emptiness surrounding me: clouds coalesce day and night, and the perpetual darkness lifts neither here nor behind a closed eye, wherein time slips silently away. A low rumble rolls beside me. This faint cry – attributed to the river, not the earth it carves beneath its wake. Strong and ceaseless. The world – as if a painting – reflects always the same image, changing only as does the viewer.
What pleasant destruction. I close my eyes, feel the water against my skin turned to stone, and hear the grind of time against my soul; the dream rushes over me.
I see you for the first time again, the thousandth time; the face I have tried infinitely to forget; your face, who stalks me every sleepless night, though I can never bring myself to wish away. Those eyes, like the sky before a storm. Your hair, sweet cinnamon, falling like autumn rain from your shoulders; and, from the part between your rosé lips, your smile – a warm hug around my corpse. You walk, unaware of the curse you laid upon me, through those doors and, immutably, into my life forever.
Your eyes shift away like hummingbirds, stalling just long enough to trap in their majesty and vanish not but a moment later. This – the one vice I regret of yours; ever since that precious first encounter – those infinite moments, falling in each other’s eyes – the closer we grew, the further your gaze drifted away. Sometimes slipping to the book in my hands, other times to an empty corner of the room, but always leaving mine alone. Yet, in their limited supply, each memory thereof holds me fast like a chain. They return to me, drown me, steal what sanctity I find in short-lived joy. Let them. There is no bliss apart from you. You hold the sea in your eyes – my heart in your hands; I still, and forevermore will, search through the thick, vast blackness of life for the light of your hummingbirds.
One lock, a ripple of cocoa like a downstream waterfall, wrests itself from the mass and across your cheek. I think – think better – think worse of it, and do not brush it myself; but let you, as morning dew from a petal. You pacify it behind your ear, wherefrom it will no doubt stray again.
You speak to me then, but I hear no words – I am listening too much – listening to the breath as it glides from your mouth, your tongue at the back of your teeth, the click of your lips separating. Your voice is the summer rays through an open window. Sweet nectar. I chase after it as after a butterfly, as after a childhood dream – follow through the air made floral by it, follow as it curls towards the clouds at the end of your sentence. My senses fall one by one under your veil; I am deaf to all but you, blind in awe.
