Liquid Pearls Over Glacial Tongues

I watched her form gilded, spun in
dusk's diaphanous silk - fragile as a swallowtail's
unfurling on the dewy, dawning world.
Will this fleeting vision glaze to memory?
The curved release of her wrist, a bird
taking winged leave of cup and bough.

My ledger thickens with torn wildflowers,
half-formed verses she breathed like
liquid pearls over glacial tongues. 
Each sunrise cocoons another filament
woven, knotted into this ragged tatterdemalion hide.

At times, beneath the monotone's whitenoise,
I sense a variant strain - the feral threnody 
of her dauntless, patient grace resounding.

If mercy were a terrain to wander, 
would we track those hills, eyes wide as awe?
Trace valleys carved in infinite tides, eroded smooth?
Discover a glade uncurling - sun-soaked, unruffled -
and simple rest amid the green insurgency?

They'll name us wicked, but we are tender folk
and I believe that yield the softer denouement -  
no pledge, but an untended meadow opened before us 
where we calibrate each footfall earthward, unhurried 
under horizons uncaring, uncumbered by vow.

Long rootless routes we've trailed, love, 
known hungers that hollowed deep as bones.
Surely now we've earned this gentler chapter weathered - 
rain's benevolent grace, fears scabbed over, calloused hands  
(so long bearing burdens) reaching across to each other's balm.

Not terminus, but respite. Not closure's defeat, 
but the steadying of breath as it slows - an untamed,  
organic hallelujah raised to chance's purpose. 
The clemency of continued unfolding.







Bittersweet Communion

I proffer solace from the monochrome deluge -
plump globes blushing silver at the streaming pane,
where raindrops hammer their ceaseless plainsong,
a sorrowful sonata echoing your name.

Enter, escape the tempest's riled domain. 
Unburden your shoulders of that drenched wool cloak,
let the storm's slick leavings,those doubts, drain away.
Join me for steaming mercy in porcelain oak -

A cauterizing balm to singe our tongues mute,
no more room for hollow words, spent and cold.  
Secrets blooming like sodden roses in the cup's basin,
that tangled briar-thicket of joy and rage,
hopes dried to brittle husks on this mottled tapestry.

No palace of finery, I fear - mere motes wilding here,
and phantoms still trailing their phantasmal spoons 
through spectral empty rooms, faint glissandi
of spilt symphonies shivered from disused afternoon light.

You may stumble upon my battered valentine  
strewn carelessly, a blushing oblation    
browning at the threshold. Too ripe, lurid, bruised. 
But for this rain-gloomed reverie, dear sorrow's feast.

Let each flaw be another lush myth to unfurl,
this crazing ceramic once cupped osetra's unrent pearls.
If your palate craves the insolent, brazen and curt -   
then plunder my heart's lusty, fulsome plums,   
their inky juices beading like ambrosia on your tongue. 
Gorge on that mealy, muddied pomander flesh 
leavened with my bitter promise of regret, 
watch it stain your lips in approximation of joy.
Perhaps it will churn violence in your belly's basin 
or find you retching up its rancid communion draught.

But that broken body, that sullied pith rendered for eating - 
there we consecrate our cloaked and severed lives, 
transfigured in empathy's rasping, sanguine breath. 
More needful than sustenance of grape or rhubarb tart,
that oblation of salved ache fuels our cracked, famished hearts.  
It's in that blemished brokenness
we find our rude, gnarled sacrament of shared life at last begun.