Broken Wings

Kneeling on a satin bed,
your Victorian dress spread about you
in a cream-coloured sea of folds,
a rose in your left ear,
and tears that run down both your cheeks;

your head bent low, your hair
parted over your right shoulder
cascading downwards -
O, you ought to be so beautiful!
Yet what is this madness that rends your face
and mars the sweetness of your
soul?

I have shown you
the Pleiades, braving the winter winds
in a field of heather under a deep December sky;
I have taken your hand and led you
to the heart of the forest,
where a cold stream flows from the dark bosom of a musty cave.

Together we watched
the broken wood-thrush flicker and die
after she met her adversary, the kitchen window.
(Do you remember the grave we dug for her,
the little bed of grass we rested her in,
and our solemn ceremony?)

I remember your eyes then:
betraying your joy,
the playfulness that is unique to
youthful discovery.
How young you seemed - how young we seemed -
how unlike now!

The old Romantic poets may have called them demons;
the doctors may call them delusions, hallucinations, and a thousand others;
I have no name for them -
perhaps save -
blues.
Or something else entirely.

How I would long to go to you:
to take you by the shoulders, shake you,
saying, "Remember the world I showed you! the world
we watched together! It has not changed,
and never will!"

O, but it does.
To you it does;
to me it does;
I cannot lie about that:
not to you (though I want to -
for you I would!).

We lay to rest, like the poor wood-thrush,
our optimism, borne out of discovery,

and soon, too soon,
lose all.