The Eclipsed
"...But when the noon wax’d bright
Her hair grew thin and grey;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay and burn
Her fire away..."
~Christina Rossetti, The Goblin Market
When the great shadow passed
across the moon's face
it shaved her just a sliver
from the full. She looked
a breaching whale in blue forever,
a bleared bacchante
swaying down the hill
drenched in black delirium,
a smile upon her lips
and bloody fingertips.
I opened every window
to that changing light, lit
the smudge of sage to guide
the wayward heart,
called your unquiet
spirit from its grave
and bid it from this dwelling to depart,
to take its cankering spit
its wailing shell
to a place where
death itself is made remote,
and instead of sheltering all
its killing cold, to
leave me alone with
just your candled ghost.
Now we rock together side by side,
peaceful as we never were in life,
old infants in moon's cradle
milk-quiet and close to sleep,
tucked within a mantling of earth-shadow
to wake upon that noonless day
when every trace of shadow falls away.
~October 2015
posted for
Top Image: Metaphysical Interior With Sun Which Dies, 1971, by Giorgio de Chirico
