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The schema is bright, it is tossed on the world
where scarcely gone out the small lamp takes a beating
mercy to brace, at the hilt of one look at you, lastly
I wanted just to be young,
with a crystal of new liberality forged in a caustic solution
of sunlight amassed in the air near my cheek
& the steamed away ice of late March.
You were the owner of my sense of beauty,
the moon that would capsize its circle
& I was there moving your radius, troubled
to tender embrace to what must have seemed far
from the axis we started on, bent as it was
by convention, rejection & play in a balance of gravities
measured by daring. But the feeling
that I became less to you quickly
the haste of which made it enduring & real
left me to try at the breaks of each fact
that inertia would slide the pin back through the splintering moon
& with you, I’d go to that fountain
to shake the cascade to its bones.
The mercury climbs high & red when it's cold
when the warmth has ebbed out of that water
when the failsafe of joy’s washed away in your signal
as aimless & white as the sea.
In my memory you’re wildly taller,
& finding you right in some argument
I’d come to love you as if you were many.
The street you cut through me was easy as smoke
but the path that led up to revolt was unfolding downhill
in a suffering different than grief, but as awful
& meanly considered.  I must not have loved you enough
without hope, as the arc-lamp, extinguished, has kept the moth close
in the darkness of trust I neglected.

© 2005 Dana Ward