Devotion

Why did she have to die so young? they asked, as if they could ever know.  
They analyzed the circumstances that took this woman of twenty-nine.  
A needle once buried and shared  
had left its mark  
below her skin.
 
He was put on suicide watch for twenty-four hours  
after the news was given.  
 
The world's most beautiful woman, he thought, had been created for him! How could that be!?
He marveled at what they both knew when they met was destiny.
 
You could see it in photos,  
the way they went together, as if they formed one greater body.  
You could see it in the way they dressed like and looked at each other.  
Somehow, somehow, somehow... was the constant reaction  
to their improbable miracle.
 
He always said, in his later days  
(he couldn't claim they were wiser days, or that he deserved the moniker, wisdom),  
that it was his grave mistake  
to use;  
it would be with him forever,  
even if he stopped;  
it would always be  
waiting for him around the corner,  
waiting for him in his memory.
 
He took it in now and again  
and it did flesh out his unstable identity.  
It gave him something to sing about.  
It gave him a way to look at the world, and understand the world.  
That itself was the tragedy.  
Sometimes he wondered if he wasn't born to do it, or what he would do without it.  
It struck him, at times, it was like they'd been conjoined;  
like a missing piece when he was born lay out in the world,  
lay on the street, lay in his friend,  
lay in the needle, the cure it contained;  
there he found himself, once,  
and only once - the rest of the times,  
he paid.
 
Her earlier photos showcased an irreplicable smile  
that no doubt in real life must have stolen all the attention,  
to the chagrin of her female friends.  
Her cheeks were full and her hair ran wild;  
that itself was the essence of this bright young muse and artist  
who chanced to find  
a quiet man containing her complementary mind.
 
There are elements of any pair  
that only the pair can understand -  
a lost, hidden language that only appears in the world when they stand together.  
That is the very treasure behind the gate,  
and when we remember  
them, and look at the smiling faces we managed to capture,  
we are beholding the garden wall.
 
He beheld his beautiful, clean, free girl  
spinning around him  
one night when he happened to be not in one of his finest moments,  
told her never to see him this way.  
But, discovered, she stayed  
and met his wretched face with the dark, framed eyes he never tired of  
what they contained.
 
He kept her back from his grave mistake  
but they had a manner (more deeply, she)  
for one to dive fully into the other simultaneously  
and try to meet while each was coming out from the other side.
 
She could not hide from or deny a part of him a part of her.  
She could not sit before this man, illiterate,  
she could not fail to understand the window.  
 
He protested, cried not ever,  
but his protestations sounded weak against the actions crying louder.
 
She craved not
a high  
(and neither anymore did he);  
she tried to know  
to feel  
his life,  
the secret code behind his misery;  
she yearned to be
her man and she  
became his last forbidden part  
'fore either one of them could stop.
It was not cheap desire
pulling forward;
none could see what drew her in, but he  
knew it was her devotion.  
He felt all of her devotion,  
like a secret never spoken,  
thriving silently and throbbing at the center of their life,  
only there for them to hear,  
like a word their love invented.
 
Her parents dug for signs they missed throughout her former life,  
inside her modeling career, low self-esteem, and instability,  
the tales that they invented to explain the incongruity.
 
They put him on suicide watch  
the night she passed from a complication,  
left by the needle,  
in her bloodstream,  
in the beating heart that loved him.
 
It was said he never recovered  
from the swallow  
by the shadow  
of a most uncommon power  
wielded poorly by the young.  
Ignorant to scientific whims of spiritual accident  
that prowl among the bright like vacuums swallowing whatever falls beneath,  
and inexperienced that they do not protect or favor great potential, brighter lights,  
no even closer to the opposite: they fall inside the moving indiscriminating hurricane  
that passes through them uninvited.  
 
Half a light went out with her  
and there is no such thing.  
The light that also burned in him was given early.  
How can age have hope to carry  
such combustion into long-life love and comfort,  
to the heights it sees before it?  
Only accident can save it  
just as accident destroys it  
when the blind and tenderhearted  
carry fire in their hands.