Dark Day Winter
(Written 1998)
I was thinking of her (when wasn’t I?). The familiar signs were all present; dry mouth, wet palms, slow breath. She was in my mind’s eye again, like some creature from some more perfect place, some place better than here. Such unlikely beauty in such a common place. The image forms slowly at first, then becomes a perfect simulacrum of her. Flawless, her skin and always cool, always pale. Her body was lithe, too graceful to appear at home on this Earth. Her hair was blonde, like she had been baptized in the purest platinum. It was shoulder length, but the gentle way it moved made it seem much longer, like her laughter. Her smile varied somewhere between seraphic and villainous. Her eyes had no less than every seasonal shade in them. The emerald of spring morning at the edge, the jade of high summer, then the gold of childhood autumn and at the center, the deepest black of a dark day winter.
Most often I imagine her standing in front of me. There is always a light, the brilliance of all the world’s machinations, and between this light and myself she stands. She, the idol, the goddess. She remains there, sometimes no more than a shadowy wisp, diminished by the brilliant world behind her, yet when she smiles, she creates a brilliance that dwarfs even a thousand suns, all exploding simultaneously.
“Thou art fair, my love; there is no spot in thee”, Song of Solomon, 4.7
