Back when the nights stretched endlessly—
how we savored the shade to flutter our eyes
at incandescent thoughts, where even the
youngest ideas, still pupating white and slung
under the bellies of our tongues, were perfumed
with dignity. In that dark, desire pooled at our feet
and all—the cold words from filigreed lips,
the moonlight, the withered men who stood
behind us, bent their heads to drink.
When the day broke us from each other
we mourned as dead gods coupled in
grief and satisfaction, to see the world
fall away in sheets, for our light
to trek in worthless abundance.
In all our days, we walk soundlessly
through empty halls built by shades,
working the knotted rope of the body
into limp velvet, yet we join
the tenderness of dusk, stretched thinly
over a valley of scars. How brief, how strange,
even, to keep meeting like this, to grow worlds
from schools of minnows, but still,
in the last night before the slumber of brilliance,
let’s lift our bodies onto an embankment of stars,
those long dead and dying things that first taught us
how beauty arrives in the dark.
