Dan Enache Poet Free verse

The Key of Mist

The Key of Mist

The key melted in my palm, like wax gone soft with dusk,
the green gate rose into skies that kept receding, farther still,
I searched for it through mirrors birthing other worlds from this one,
and in its place I found only my shadow, dead inside my words,
and the key, turned into dew, ran through the whole of my dreaming,
and was lost in the evening's smoke, like a song without a voice.

I looked for it on a spiral staircase without any end,
it was a night like the inside of a cathedral made of crystal,
and the steps climbed toward the stars and descended toward the roots,
the frozen candles burned with violet flames,
and every flame put out before the icons became a galaxy,
spinning inside me like a clock stopped out of eternity.

And I stayed in my tower of smoke, under three burnt coats of arms:
Memory's, which aches in me, Forgetting's, which calls me on,
and a Dream's, that never returned from any night long past,
and I stayed in the gothic tower, lord over my own vast reaches,
over an empire of mirrors in which I am nothing at all,
only an echo dissolving into its own mystic abyss.

And since last night moments have passed like butterflies of mercury,
and since last night hours have passed like rivers turned back into the sky,
and dawn, its wings scorched from so much running through the void,
scattered through my hair the glimmer of dead constellations,
and every living moment turned to stone on another step,
of the staircase that rose toward me and descended toward someone else.

And I went down the staircase... but on the very last step
my key had turned into a cup made of opal,
filled not with hemlock wine, but with liquefied stars,
and I drank from it the silence of every lost night,
and I read at the bottom of the cup, as in a wise old book,
the shipwreck of my soul, that has waited for me a lifetime.

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Alison A Smith September 10, 2026 at 6:37 PM A haunting, richly surreal free-verse journey, where each transformation of the key deepens the poem’s dream-logic and sense of spiritual exile. The gothic imagery—violet flames, crystal cathedral, mercury butterflies, opal cup—creates an immense, luminous inner landscape, while the recurring staircase gives the piece a powerful movement through memory, forgetting, and selfhood.