In the universe of the two rooms, she gathers her dreams between her palms
In the universe of the two rooms, she gathers her dreams between her palms,
She lets her fired hair descend upon the folds of our fleeting time.
"It's the end," she articulates with a voice sipping from the last silences,
Through the mirror in which we have often been born and died together.
I watch as she spreads the roots of fire over her shoulders,
In the innocence of what will melt and crumble under gazes.
I wish to be Adam, to feast upon the forbidden fruit of the heart,
But our Eden is now nothing more than a colorless portrait on the wall.
In bed, I embrace her lost silence, somewhere between my ribs,
My arm, a sleeping serpent upon her white neck, searching for the pulse of life.
My hands — two frightened mollusks — came to a shy halt on her skin,
Clasping fingers, joints, a prayer to the elbows whispered.
She rises and the nightgown becomes a kind of pale ghost,
"Enough," she murmurs, "this is fine," in the echo of her voice, a suspended goodbye.
I watch as the echo of her steps vanishes in the marble of the corridors,
Through the ajar door - a beggar of her silken memories.
As she leaves our concrete garden, under the swaying trees,
She asks — a final whim — "buy me high heels with thin spikes,
Shoes with black, thin heels," and then a moment’s reconsideration,
"No, I want them to be red." It’s a longing for shoes on the road to nowhere.
While the poinsettias shake under the weary sun, I close the door—
I close a book whose last page burns, and between the lines, does not.
Copyright ©
Dan Enache
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