Burn and Burn and Burn

for Megan Shay

First she was a late autumn breeze
coming through a café door
surrounded by
a phalanx of ebullient guards

Curious with her eyes wide open
glancing at the contents of the room
as if it were a ghostly pantry
of beeswax candles
and dried old mystery herbs
jars of dust preserved like patient guests
by buckets and deserted brooms

And as she left
again in the centre of an undulation of flesh
blown like orange and scarlet leaves around her
I felt the blue breath of her speechless passage
and asked and asked and asked

And as fixed winter came down
Her candle gaze of snowy attention
sparked a fire in my hibernating furnace
found in the locked basement of memory
and I could not hide
from the burning of her waking cold
or frostbite of her perfect touch
as sideways like the ghost of snow
she went and came and went again

And often I could not see her through her blizzard
but only hear her voice as it floated on
electric wave from Christmas
in the valley of sweetly frozen grape
or five blocks up the steepest street;
her words written down as wind inscribes
on banks of drifted paper snow
or tiny runes on shifted dunes of blown sand

And once she arrived large and sudden
as a wall of affronted weather
wafting some paper scraps before her
like a fallen dove’s shattered feathers
And in a sudden gust called my name
and indicated that my supposition
had offended her growing care
and slim modicum of human trust

And once calm as horse latitudes can be
her whisper seemed to say
(as it tangled my brain in a dream
of soft Sargasso sea)
I love you you will never lose me
but as a wind without edge or ropes
she moves and moves, is always there,
but like her subtle soul, always she is air

Her whispers and trick hunting whistles
tell me she wants me near but far
here not there or there not here or be with me
But you can’t hope to be
beside me when I cannot be held or hold
contained unless you’re as patient
as a canvas sail on a still lake stalled
then someday I will arrive big or small
and move you here to there and touch you
as a breeze across curved landscape
and through the stretching trees
until you start to smoulder then
leave you in the centre of that water
to smoke and sputter, wave and yearn,
leave you where I can discern
your perfect heart
burn and burn and burn.