Through Light Saint Yellow's Gate I've fled,

Winter leaves, musty, dead.

Softened colors long since bled.

Dew-lipped Eurydice, imagined wed.

Little birds have little aught
But their love of being little.

One ought have a little bird's love
But many have naught.

No chronology was possible
Time ebbed and flowed
Like water under a moon;

She'd turn the clocks to face the wall in every room.

Description was equally unlikely.

Blonde hair swept back.

High forehead, arched brows.

Eyes in wonder round.

There was an innocence of mutual discovery
That first day outside English Lit,

Too close for comfort.

Yet too compelling her wit.

It must have been her white raincoat

Or her white kiss at the stair top

That led me down to her graven underworld.

It was the first step.

Like breath, exhaling.

As I was drawn toward her
She drew back;

My lungs, her air.

Another downward step:

A sudden downpour in the afternoon
Of a cave that could have been our home
But that was, as they say, water on the moon.

There was a bridge from nowhere to nowhere.

Its undersides echoed our words
Like a fugue of shakuhachis.

Like a clash of Samurai swords.

Another step deeper still:

Like the clocks, I faced the wall.
She stood behind me, frozen til
Pressed against me, in her thrall.

After innocence came incandescence.
She taped a string of bells to my ceiling.
Turned off the lights and lit the string.

A small flame rose with bells pealing.

When she left, she left me reeling
Like a moth around a flame.

Doomed to be consumed by feeling
And suddenly that flame is gone.