xvii: evaporite

Must all be tinged from the first? It is strange,
this reactive safety -

I have dissolved a salt garden where minerals grow in spirals;
celestine blooms under the mourning star,
more delicate than the cyclic datura.
No floral impatience will decompose
the place I have made among
the sandstone roses and azurite towers.

if the intimacy of rolling fog off the sea,
rising through the trees; if even this
cannot break me open to receive,
perhaps the potency of ancient
and quiet things will.

Perhaps the answer lies
in welcoming my grief,
deferred for centuries…

…and so I dreamt the aurora storm, unbodied where
this unworded language is spoken in thunder; starvation snow falls
where lightning struck as though the violent dancing greens were some
harbinger of the andromeda, a spiraling war untold in the remains of a life.
broken and bitter
untrusting and unilaterally unforgiving…

...and so I dreamt the very night was tidal,
shimmering and shifting in
counter-rhythm with the rising void,
so full of whorls and waves and wonder -
hidden therein, however deeply, my simple need to celebrate
honor and strength and courage and love. I cannot abandon these.
Whatever the cost, the decision to act and to give remains…

...and so I dreamt you; my night-wished wanderer, within a nautilus mythos -
across the eons, across extinction.
for years I have searched for your teeth to hold in my hands.

If I could be allowed, as a last request,
to offer a wish with blood and thus a prayer -

May there yet come a night when our flight is not
shadowed by an age of wounds;

May there yet come a time when we need not sacrifice.