The golden hour fills the air
Our eyes and skin reflect the glow
No warning to announce her, no
Assurance that her grace shall go
No sooner than we’ve had our fill
That blush from everywhere around
Then nowhere, sudden as she came
Our feet, the coolness of the ground
Hold onto memory like wisps
Some sweet intoxicating waft
The mind like water slides and drifts
In sunlight fading, cool and soft

Water frozen in mid fall
Down a cliff or dam
Or the steps of a river
Is monument to a moment that earned no special right
To its longevity
Like the ashen faces of Pompeii
Or the broken chain link fence outside
Reactor 4
The hour that we fled
With only what our hands possessed
A high fidelity photograph
Etched of atoms and dust
What these giant bones remember
Is what a laugh or second pour forgets
Our wish for permanence granted
That golden moment only stilled
In our returning
The spring thaw’s dance of molten water
Never changing
Always young.

Your fear absorbed my words like
a deep matte black, Classified
skin over a sharp and angular
aircraft that hides ordinance
in its gut; a black hole, a singularity:
Posited by theory but by nature
Unobservable.

I felt its gravity draw something
from my chest, I know not what
Rage encased in ice perhaps?
(The final scene of a movie that
displays the folly of its victors) — I
thought it honest to speak of it
To tell you, beloved, and so perhaps
to crack its sheath crystalline,
which displays, distorts, but you disclosed
It was design, not falter, to withhold;
And in that beat reflexive parts did
mute the bitter opus that somewhere
may yet reverberate.

It was in pondering this, our son
did point my eyes to mineral and
rock, his prime affinity at T-minus
such and such: Obsidian, her
ebony piano gloss in crisp defiance,
mirthful grace, contrast to
that deep black of gravity:
matte, event horizon haloed; We
Love it Seek it Design it into All
we carry, All we use perhaps
because the Light, if focused tight
enough, glints bright and kicks
Her tumble off in revelry against the
emptiness of dark and
Pristine night.

Take my hand then love
and dance with me as sunlight
on the timid crests of some
unfathomed ancient lake. Do not
mistake some shallow tender glow
for peace. Take courage
as we ride this birth
of tears and numb exhaustion
into what? We can not know
Except that we may travel there
Together.