A hairbrush lies on the middle of a bare dresser
As dust cascades beside a sunlit window pane

A telephone rings out in an empty apartment
As the rain glows underneath a streetlight outside

A balloon is caught and disappears in the wind
Below the field of corn that murmurs as it bends

And that door doesn't close. I don't want it to close.

I must confess,
Amidst the swirling blizzard
That I had been waiting.
How to explain that feeling
As you lent into the storm
To cradle my focus
Before it swam away.

I still remember
The first encounter.
How when you're a child
Worlds alter during mealtimes.
As the adults in the room hesitated
I saw then that you lived
In the gap between their words.

I was raised in fear
To believe you spoke only
The language of regret.
To never disturb 'neath the hood
Or pause to revere, the haunting beauty
Of those lingering webs
Misting dew drenched fields.

I see you approach
In dreams, as soothed calm encompasses
Those vague surroundings
Outside, on the line
All that haunts us is just time
Looking back, like a drawn
Face in the basin.

I understand now,
Perhaps, I realised even then
Under the night somewhere
In the faint darkness
You walk beside me.
Under an emerging moon somewhere
The paths of our shadows meet.

I lie with you and with our memories
Playing like butterflies in soft wavering light
As a taut melody, from mornings coming song
Broods against the restless horizon.
From the first bloom of light
You embodied, certain fictions in my mind
As you compressed, your hopeful dreams within mine.
Buttressed, we thought, to withstand the appetite of time.
Yet we’re so easily winnowed from the past,
We are not now capable of locating our dreams,
Pallidly flickering beneath the constant stars.
Enchantment is fleeting, yet its memory is potent,
And I confess, my love, for a long time
I became stuck down in that cave,
Looking back out over burnished days.
“Be careful you don’t become lost there”
Yet I pressed on, until your voice became thin.

Orpheus had to look back, but he returned to the world.
As night passes on into triumphant morning,
We too have come back, but a shade remains
The shadow that turns, looks back, and listens.
Lyrics change, but the tone remains constant
True meaning lays beyond language
As time weights the scales, they're removed from our eyes.
Rhythm is established in waves breaking over us
Grey overlays gold, but its never subsumed
Your hair shimmers, in the quiet light of the ruins
The aureate thread that led us home.
For we are still here on this morning, the eternal morning
Where love sings all things to itself, across time.

I sing this to no one (to you who I’ll
 never know) but our eyes have met
 and in a glimpse, I saw it.
 I sing only of a moment
 caught by the breeze, as it whistled
 merrily across the water
 But for a moment there
 in a fathomless pool
 I saw it all

The sky blackens now
The voices fall silent
The moon hangs pale and thin
The oceans exhale now
The breeze speaks softly
The tides become dolefully still
The gods are absent now
The stars remain hidden
The universe pauses for you

Hunters from the dark
dancers in tight bunches
consolidate together as shadow.
Waiting for first light, they wait
to see what becomes.
Hands work down
broad cavalcades of ochre;
flames glint over vigorous tools.
Maneuvering across, they move
with bright reverence
and their own deep purpose.
On the wide grassland
each thing gestures its appetite,
and its consequence.

I open my eyes to let you go
And hold on a moment longer
Morning, and its forceful breath
Shakes the dangling blossom off the tree.
I remember you once saying
Beauty always arrives too soon,
And that's precisely the right time.

Earth hidden in dust
Rivers flooded with rain
The tongues destructive lust
To mark the world in vain

Rocks buried by stone
Fire consumed by flame
The harm never to be undone
As we first presumed to name

Angels grounded by wings
Lives beholden to a Lord
The desire to sully all things
Through the fallacy of a word