beneath the stars that drift; she sighed and said "Every tale of a love can only be a tale of ghosts that linger in these spaces wecan never hold,"—as the wind gave echo

we lived depravityand called it truth, silencingour dreaming, andour love, discardingthings holy.

that I thought of you—of the air that slippedbetween the strands of your hair, and blue stonesin my hand, before the autumn damasksbloom their last, before these blue stones are lainforgotten as the blossoms of plum treesI could not render in my artless hands

a few words spoken beneath the moon, lovemay be, but I write your namein the celestial dust that lingersin the air, abovethe veilchenblau roses, callowand pale

. . .the sorrows of the heart yearn to be erased, for one final atonementfinite and forgetting and whole—but time in its preservingwill not permit forgetting; destroyingonly when we can no longer begor argue with time to preserve the brief benisonsa few moments longer than our sins

. . .in your light, had I learned to love, here in your beauty, could I speakknowing of this space close withinas the breath held inside a garden rose, there— there is no time.

. . . Thisis not the same river at my fingertips. There are no paths, no sunken roadsfamiliar in the forest, by which we canretrace our steps, by which we can escapeby which we can reclaim and return, or hear the child’s song running in the timothy . . .

those whom love has held, has held here in timecurious, in this labyrinth of roses—it will go on holding, though in cruelty—of stars we could not reach for, but still remembered.

. . .our whispered words, faintly in the darkness, dissolvingwithin the trees—then, fleeting words of consolationwould not suffice if feigned, and flippant wordsconfessed reluctance—our wordswere meaningless uttered on the wind. . .

To forget would mean the things we never knew had never waited to be known, never waitedto be forgotten, had never been; waitingbeneath the long dead starsin time. . .