Opus in Grief

‘I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.’
-Rumi

You stood against the night
Smiling and nervous.
I let you in and watched you
Like one admires a God: in awe.
A million words passing through our eyes,
I knelt there, waiting, shivering.
We were too close in our urgency to see one another,
Enveloped in our shared warmth and scent,
Unraveling into pools of cotton and buckles.
Strange beautiful insomnia that night.

And as morning crept in,
And I forgot to look at you in the dawn clarity
You promised me eternity
Without parting your lips.

There was also the night when
Drunk on a thousand thoughts and tipsy on love,
You lay with me in the grass,
Hearing words of songs I completely forget.
You looked up and where I looked down,
Our eyes met with such intensity...
And while the world around us
Was busy being worldly and human
You whispered your love a million times over
And let it grow inside me.

Even in your weakness
In the impotence of the night
You towered over me
With your splendor.

That is how I remember you
By singular solitary images
There is also the one of you walking
Down the gray asphalt
Clouds drifting around us.
Your step light and strong, shoulders back
Your hands already holding me, ten meters away...
Even now the love I feel for you
The tip of my finger can only graze,
And my mind only phanthom.

‘... the sun never sets here...’
It is true we never saw it take rest
High as we were
On top of the world.

From friendship we grew into our world of love
Bending in through a secret.
From enmity, worse: indifference
Into this precocious rhapsody.
Just when I began to know love,
Just as I began to enter its million mile threshold,
All the world ceased and began simultaneously to exist.
In one second my life had melted.
Your presence having found its resting place
In the deepest crevice of my soul, yanked out.

The last image
Is the one of the small alcove above two lovers
Desperately hanging on to life
And the back of your body clearing a path away