There is so much good in the worst of us,
and so much bad in the best of us,
that it behooves all of us not to talk about the rest of us.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
I look into the mirror and see his eyes –
golden, like the sun,
like her hair –
burning through the silvered glass.
Alone, I feel the chill of his gaze,
the heat of his frustrated desire and pain,
wrapping me like a sodden blanket,
a fever-dream
with no rhythm or rhyme.
I thought to save her
from the exile of his self-imposed darkness;
She was to be his salvation,
trading her life for dreams of shadow and smoke;
I did not know the truth.
I had not tasted the dark music that moved them,
knew not the siren song of dreams that
die with waking.
I understand him so much better now,
for I loved her, too.
Light is defined by the absence of darkness;
and there can be no shadow
without the light of the sun.
She could not have gone to him,
did she not have the safety of my arms to leave.
I torture myself daily,
looking within this glass
where once was found a monster,
asking myself what she saw in him
that she could not see in me;
Every day the differences are harder to find.
That face, masked in shadows,
half hidden from the light --
I can no longer tell if it is his
or mine.
AMH
22 April 2005