As My Name

Sometimes, my love, it hurts too much to show you these visions.  To plunge so deep into lost life and fractured memory.  Shrieking “Mea Culpa” among phantoms who claim their innocence even as they stalk and drift through shattered lands.  There are demons in the temple, my love.  Wraiths beneath our beds.  Ghosts among the boundary stones, living in our heads. They will not acknowledge nor process their sins.  But I am so very guilty of loving you.  Ashes and sand remain, where once the harbor shone.  God forgive me.  I still love my husband, blind, even now.  My dearest friend.  But oh how I miss my wife.  Guilt like newborn sight.  To know my name once more.  Breath-taking in your eyes, Little Rock.  Guiltier still because I wouldn't change a thing.  Not a moment on that black and hellish path to find you, to know you again.  Change one thing and we ourselves are changed.  Change enough and perhaps this fevered dream collapses.  No, I pay it gladly – that toll.  Friend and guardian until death.  

But I cannot always put vision to choir: when the wound is still too raw, and the pain far too sweet.  I didn't grasp the ecstasy of this quartered path until I remembered you.  But now, give me your light and your heart and I shall be torn a thousandfold.  Adore, ajar.  Bones beneath the floor.  I call you in.  This earth is yours, my love.  This agony.  All yours.  The Angel of All Songs plays his lyre for you and you alone, wild star.  You are my many and my one.  Omkara Vahishta, my Asha.  In Her.  In Me.  My Joy, redeemed.  My Grace, concealed.  Brazen, delicate.  Sometimes even I am torn too deeply to put sight to such songs.  Instead I weep, of course.  And sing.  In your voice.  In the voices of those who would know your hidden places.  Eli, they called him.  Kashai.  The priest, the touched, loving and beloved.  Sol, before his throat was slit.  The edge of the known.  Shining harbors.  Golden rivers met, long ago, yet not so long.  With promise to meet again.  Can I hold you?