Notes: For Gabri and my sister. A bit of the structure for this poem is stolen from Sylvia Plath; I'm sure she wouldn't have minded. Also, I've just realized that I've never written a poem from Luke's POV. Coincidence? (Maybe not.) Enjoy!
The Simplification of Conflict
I
remember darkness – night's icy
comfort,
and black deeds that strike and sting
in
their cold elegance. Wrong? Yes. But
somehow
beautiful in the twisting
ways
they wormed around objections of
morality
or justice. Evil
has
an allure, like the translucent
gleam
of thin ice:
unstable
but hypnotic.
And
then I noticed light – not the vague,
unbiased
glare of steadfast absolutes,
but
tinted blue. Pale blue. Like the crackle
of
electric charge, like the scalding
sparks
of a quivering flame, like his
eyes.
Like him. A noontime sun can
damage
more than divulge. But slowly
letting
starlight pervade shadows
is
gentler; drawing out the pain, yet
uncovering
piece by piece the facts
concealed
beneath the gloom.
Truth
hurts. I fought that gradual
revelation
– I doubted, clashing against
a
will as stubborn as my own.
Conflict
simplifies things: the woman
misguided,
the man resolute.
Wrestling,
struggling, slipping
'til
the fracas creates fusion,
two
rivals rolling into one
reality,
one perspective, a
single
(shared) heartbeat.