Resurrection

Behold in a window a lover's vision,
a tryst of amethyst and blue sapphire.
What within such beauty does inspire? —
as if spellbound in time's oubliette
some metaphorical muse might abet
an escape from my existential angst.
A moth, tapping its wings against
the windowpane, flounders in a web
of shadow, struggling to resist the ebb
of life, perhaps rapt by some fond
hint of summer in the glow beyond
the glass, not content to go to rest
where, unmoved and silent, the forest
in its sepulchral pose has fallen victim.
Then, like some serpentine totem,
this faintly foreboding presentiment
settles in, as I halfheartedly attempt
to chase its chill from my mind—
but it only moves downward to wind
its way around my spine, snake-wise.
And so, as the sun's final flare belies
the cold, I rise to close the shutters,
pausing as a frail winged form flutters
to the ground. Thus this passion play
attains, in the dying light of day,
an end where death becomes sublime.

Such is the peril of the poet's pastime
that the sanctuary behind one's doors
becomes a stage of cryptic endeavors,
wherein the mind, in blind devotion,
working the mine of buried emotion,
succumbs to rhythm's relentless drum.
And so I retreat into my last modicum
of comfort, reticently replaying my part,
following day after day as they depart
into their mercifully muted demise.

Surely it comes as no great surprise,
that signs of change loom close to home,
like a troubled sleeper's mournful moan
in the night. Around me, once familiar
things are beginning to appear peculiar:
photographs of people I barely recognize;
once loved books now filled with lies;
the paraphernalia of years gone by,
forgotten and forsaken. Even the wry
looks of friends now seem to falter
when we meet—as discreetly they alter
their mood—and with the ambiguous
smiles of dolphins, so sweetly dubious,
they feign a kindness which the eyes
give away. Logic no longer denies
that in some complex quixotic quirk
of spacetime—a quark gone berserk?—
my life has been inexplicably rearranged,
and my once and future self now changed.
There is an odd feeling to this insight,
as I write it here in black and white,
that my world—I know not why—has flopped
inside-out, and, like a drop undropped,
I'm somehow suspended in mid-dance,
where the imagined meets happenstance,
a dreamland in which I can transgress
the everyday rules of consciousness,
reliving lives I can no longer disown,
reloving lovers I must have known
in the memory-soft bed of my amorphous
history, until, as the all too tenuous
bridge between the realm of what seems
true and the netherworld of dreams
begins to dissolve, I'm misplaced in some
halfway house of a makeshift simulacrum,
as somewhere, somewhen, time is waylaid,
and an erstwhile hour irretrievably mislaid,
though in my mind not a minute is amiss.
These things I know one could dismiss
as madness, revealing in subtle intimations
the glimmerings of imminent transformations.

Once again, delivered from the gloom,
a veil of indigo now drawn upon the room,
I watch the moonstruck moth take flight,
loath to bequeath its spirit to the night.
Floating beyond the tracery of trees,
a pearl-like paraselene at last frees
itself from their grasp; while flickering
above, the constellations begin stirring,
as if they gather at some celestial ball,
to dance throughout the infinite hall
of the cosmos, performing in sidereal
time an exquisitely executed quadrille.
Hence entranced by this nightbound
scene, could I perhaps sleep sound?
And touched by such transcendence,
so serene in the lunar luminescence,
is it possible I might again abide
some resurrected love by my side?

The moth now reappears at the window,
seemingly doomed to reprise its imbroglio,
and like some tragic and discomposed
impostor in the wings, I'm transposed
into my double, staring into space,
a look awestruck wonder on my face,
at this fusion of mirror and illusion.