Of Luminous Things

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ove had been a mystery,
until you unravelled me
in that heated Cyprian night;
hidden, but growing,
how you burned me, burned in me,
turned us into shimmering energy;
not merely incandescent from the heat,
but glowing by our very atoms;
how you taught me the way
of luminous things; how they worked with your
own luminosity; how our shadows on the walls
were like flames, our raw bodies freshly cut wood
thrown to the fire; you taught me
how a single touch of the mouth
could so easily devour;

and to break from each other
would have been to snap one body in two,
or to turn the world colder,
so we transcended the night
in the safe passage of our bodies,
no longer of names and bodies of our own,
we became a pushing need of belief
that our unity had brought to life
its very purpose -- a genetic need to consume,
to dig ever deeper like fire
adding to its hungry madness
like some giant mirror,
to become a minute commodity
until we ceased to be;

how resilient was flesh to this burning
ploughed in fields of fire,
night eclipsed by day,
our senses could no longer tell
who was the source, and who the reflection
of this desperate fire igniting its own course
that no one could foretell;
so we fed off its sparks
afloat in the night like starry flotsam;
and I remember I whispered in your ear --
how even when all else
had dimmed to the darkest --
I would wake up
to see you shining; as though you were making
heat from our light
like some original sun;

and pushing deep in the coals
of the night, we grew in the other
like light reflecting light,
which is like love (so you told me),
it does not mimic,
but interprets what is true,
and cannot run on empty,
or without the fuel of two,
and so you burned me down,
cleaned out my house, through and through,
until there was only our ashes left,
glowing its embers
in my darkened room,
as we laughed like children
watching the Sun give way to the Moon.

Published 26 December, 2010

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