Lute no Longer           

Take love,
though you needn't really.
Hollowness expands in me
like a strange new life,
or cancer --
a blackness between suns,
an ungiddy breathlessness.

Unlike my purblind dog
who can still see shadows but
trips tackling one step
I don't wish to step down, or up,
sense no reward in sweet grass,
gentle winds strumming one
like a lute, in last night's
deer-droppings, honeysuckle,
or even in shunning the cold.

This is a different dark,
certainly uncomfortable,
or I would not sing of it now.
It is no song, though,
but monotone.
Decades ago, like all
too-introspective youth,
I adored death, though I
boast no scars or chart
to say I tried him.

Decades later,
I still cling to that dark lover
but without passion.
Last night, a young lady with
black hair and goth eyes said,
I am in love with someone
who doesn't exist.
Better, I said, than
being out of love with
everyone who does.

A year ago God kissed me
hard on the lips,
and left me trembling.
I don't mean
God, of course,
just the everything
it's said he is.
I am in some brackish embrace,
drowning, drowning.

Leave me here with the fish
coursing in and out of
subterranean coves.
I am one of them,
going through their motions
with unblinking eyes, after
one thing only: motion, motion.
But most importantly,
motion.

Copyright Julie K. Shavin 2009