When younger, unrequited love compelled the heart and strained the throat. A salt water harbor. There the crashing waves keeping tempo–a melody set against the moon of prayers filling round — fate’s dancers in gloss and silvery web, walking on water in an arc.
But when the pull of love goes out, her costumery become the tide’s undertow, tearing, taking, violent winds ripping at sanity. A naked organ beating on the sand.
I learned seasons of love later that it would have been easier , true less enigmatic, to let love’s rip tide claim another on another shore. But I of moons’ cast, was drawn without hesitation into the net of love’s lost in darker recesses.
His hands were bold in the way stone boulders are against high seas. His eyes a melting candle against the flame of some godly match. I felt him dripping on my body, burning inhibition off the personality as easily as I plucked and skinned the grapes we ate. Purple mist we inhaled.
In the pitch of beginnings, the anticipation of endless climaxes, we are anesthetized by pleasure –a lover’s grace, an immunity to the common place. Addicts of love we become, the fix the love itself –an unequalled high, we rise in love pretending not to notice the precipice we are navigating towards.
If I had learned how, I would have curled up inside his body and perished there, though it was not womb hunger. It was the fire there consuming. Chants that surrendered flesh into sighs and lips like coral reefs, swaying and sucking. His hands were bold the way stone boulders are against high seas. His eyes a melting candle against the flame of some godly match.
Years stretched between us, sea upon sea of emotions taken and given to others, high and low tides unending. Millions of places of port and daily log, our life journies catalogued a part.
Yet in the moon’s reflection, still l see there the shadow of this love. A love that rose and fell again. A burden not on earth but a blessing, a single wave of deity cresting in two places. How deeply written these dramatic territories of blood and spirit, undulations of souls finding each other on earth and then forgetting. Arriving and departing at seperate moments.
Touched by this nocturnal fire, the soul consumed after lightening strikes, illuminating deep love well hidden, salt water purifies.
JZMH