Courtney,
The name
doesn’t seem like enough
to describe the wondrous hope
stirred in cold coals
of fire long since burned.
You were gliding
off the storm that tossed you
and shaped you.
You smelled singed
by the clashes of shock
in the maelstrom.
You were sodden with the sub-lucid fumes
of unfettered pleasure,
and thus you plunged
out of the vortex
into my cold hearth.
Since I breathed
that first wisp of you
into me,
I am
forever changed.
  My smothering black skin bleeds
away into the sky,
chased into the night
by the dance of stars’
returned to this world of men.

Black swirls cut
like sprites
away from the breath upon me,
and the forgotten embers
presumed quenched
smolder with orange joy and pure white,
yawning broad with warmth
from beneath their dark slumbers.
They stretch
and nuzzle
across their thawing bodies,
and ever more rouse
to the touch of life
and breath of love.
The chuckling of
irony driven clear
accompanies the roar
of renewed life
as these embers within
smile and lick
into the air
and shine
out into the world.
I offer the
warmth you have returned to me
as the uplifting voice you need
to climb into the sky where you belong.
To hold you aloft
(so the world may see
the love you kindled
in my now burning heart,
so that our love shines
into the dark and the cold)
is the deepest wish
of the man’s heart
whence you have become part.
Yet sated not,
To be left aloft
you fan the fervor
that draws my crackling soul
upward with you.
The dance of roaring flame and reviving wind,
so soon began,
now feeds us both
in endless burning harmony.