Untitled - (Dreams of Darkness and Light)

Out of the darkness he came,

only a voice, disembodied,

faceless

(truer than I knew);

a man of mist and shadow,

insubstantial even when given form,

quicksilver slick,

running like mercury through the fingers.

His eyes are shattered mirrors

in a locked and empty room,

shuttered and deep and shot through with gold;

His heart is pain, fractured night –

and he guards it well within walls of roses

black-red and brimming with curved thorns.

I will never know his face

any more than his heart –

both concealed

by gleaming silk the color of a love lost,

perverted and destroyed;

shrouded in mourning for the death of hope;

the chains in which he binds himself no less cruel

in the guise of a black silk mask.

Though I have begged him,

he will never reveal

his face or soul

to me.

I cannot know him, though I try.

Self-exiled, alone,

he lives within his silken prison,

no longer alive to the possibility of redemption,

faith lost, trust torn asunder –

his only joy the thunder of the organ,

the ivory and black caress of the piano,

or the tremulous sob of his violin.

His music seethes, weeps, moans

giving voice to his suffering

the only window for his pain upon the world.

I would share his sorrow,

wrest the torturing chains from his slender frame,

beat back the choking shadows that gibber and wail at his heart,

poisoning his dreams;

I would surrender my own dim candle to the windswept night,

laying my frail body between him and the clutching darkness,

pressing my warmth to his chill lips

to breathe him to life again.

I would

But I do not.

Instead, I obey the unspoken rule,

sacred, inviolate:

Always together, forever apart –

exchanging glances rather than whispered entreaties,

flinching away from the careless brush of fingers,

unseeing, unfeeling

touching only within the confines of the music.

It is a torment,

the pain something akin to pleasure,

to live each day knowing he will never know the woman here before him;

His hands will never caress my hair,

nor my hands his face;

My kiss will never bring him peace.

He only hears the notes I sing.

AMH

March 3, 2005