I touched your hand.
Friction.
a brush, a spark
and we caught.
Ran reckless through the dark like struck flint,
heat blooming in the emptied of your throat,
your laughter breaking open the night
like a match snapped in half.
winded. Barefoot.
Wind-wild and want-fed,
we let the world blur behind us,
a smudge of dim city lights,
a distant hum, a thing forgotten.
Love was a bonfire then,
spitting live-coals,
love notes burning on dancing tongues
Like incense, purifying the appointed stone.
Kisses sparked, hands like kindling,
everything too much, too close, too bright.
We burned through days,
through maps and miles,
through mornings laced with sweat and citrus.
Spoke in gasps, in hands at the small of a back,
A palm that flared with your hips
in the susurrus between the door clicking shut
and the next collision.
We burned.
Like a moth that does not know
that blaze is ravenous
Consuming seasoned oak
Yet,
Flames can die.
But,
The blaze is not gone,
It has learned restraint.
It glows, slow and sure, beneath the ironwood years,
a buried live-ash nestled in the grain of time,
seeping warmth into the pith of bone,
not the leaping flare of youth,
but the steady burn of something tested, tempered, true.
It lingers in the susurrus between spoken things,
in the quiet choreography of knowing hands,
in the way your respiration folds into mine
like waves that have long learned the strand.
Man knows woman.
Not hunger now, but sustenance
Not fever, but the throb beneath the skin,
not the wild combustion of reckless nights,
but the measured heat that seasons iron,
that bends but does not break,
that feels the freight of what will last.
Step on step, hand on hand,
woven into the deep-worn grooves of years,
we are no longer kindling,
no longer wind-fed flame,
but the coal that keeps the hearth alive,
the blaze that does not boast of its own brightness,
but burns on, unseen, unwavering, sure.
Your voice no longer cracks the silence,
but moves through it, filling its corners,
folding itself into the susurrus of the house,
the long corridors of waiting, of knowing, of stay.
Your hand is not grasping, but guiding,
palms lined not with haste, but with the quiet assurance
that comes from weathering the thousand small tempests
that time and sorrow set upon the strand.
Love is no longer the wild unspooling
of ribbons in wind,
but the binding of pages,
the leather-worn freight of a tome read again and again,
its meaning shifting, deepening,
with each turning of the leaves.
We have walked through blaze, and not been consumed.
Have buried our dead, and risen again.
Have learned that love is not measured in the breaking,
but in the bending, in the binding,
in the slow gold sheen of endurance.
And still you are blaze
A coal that holds its heat in the long dark,
the lantern that does not flare,
but burns, steady as the pull.
And still I am wood
but now the oak that will not break,
that yields only enough to hold your name in its grain,
to murmur through its rings that once we were wild,
but now we are wise.
And when the last live-ash turns to ash,
when winter, white and still,
lays its final susurrus upon our bones,
it will not be as those who burned and were lost
but as those who, having burned,
became the radiance.
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