Sunday, March 4, 2012

Exhumation

Exhumation

There cannot be a dark in me
More dark than where the peeping stars
Are swimming now like luminescent
Phytoplankton in a boundless sea.
But underneath the waning moon
When all the world is wrapped in dreams
And feels the failing light grow frail,
I breathe myself into a fog
Of silvery silence, cold and pale,
Where endless space is soon erased,
Replaced (if only for a time)
By shapes and shades I cannot name,
Though beckoning like memories
That sit beyond the edge of thought
And wave like trees in midnight winds.
But when one looks more carefully
Within that dark that mirrors space,
Forever severed out of time,
The light, as always, flits and fades,
As fog chokes out both light and night
To make a separate darkness there,
And here, in me, and bid me sleep.
But as I slip beneath the blanket
Offering eternal dreams of peace,
I feel a hand upon my cheek,
Another on my chilling heart
That is itself so near to sleep
As if grown weary from its toil.
And with their touch the clammy mist
Disperses, sinking down to earth,
And leaves that dark of cosmic night
Alight with all the things we wish,
Which shimmer now within my reach,
Reflected in two moonlit eyes
That somehow see a light in me
That flickers as a night-bright star.

Image credit: Josh Lewis, from Wikimedia Commons, under a Creative Commons License.

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