Black tulip
.
You’re but two copies of rare, frail, filigrees,
words lost across hemispheres, centuries apart,
the north holding one to warm it's chest,
the other lost in this great solving south

I wander around this contrived library, possessed
by crystals, china, harps and hearths,
histories cocooned in wealth,swept under
the pasts inglorious parquet floor

There in the middle of this lost lexicon
I found a strange antique memory,
a black four poster bed, silk draped and hiding
her heart within some haunting light

No one comes here to see the soft lit portraits,
the whimsical girls hidden beneath oils
for decades toiling to reveal their beauty
to a world that lost them under time

In the midst of all this, my world turned
on a tangible shaking axis,
and round I came grinding, to you cornered,
holding the black tulip for me alone

What strange strings I heard in that room,
what time slowed to a fractured tick
of a Dublin clock, gathering dust,
what was it that I'd found? What trick?

One half of a heart, pure and stilled
awaiting the breath of time or life
to bring it back to mind, to grieve
for its long solace alone

And reunite with that other half, a twin
in the northern hemisphere, taken
long ago from here, in this
unspoken, grieving, land

And bring it home.

(Epilogue) The minnow migrates

That's it, now you’ve divorced the past
a final judgement made to last,
a lifetimes worth of decisions bear,
you by courses unknown, to here

Where back you’re blown, low at stern
of this bark, sea tossed, and never
to return

To a land you left so long ago
reborn in a stream, in the great
land below

There at the bank, wedged in the grass,
you have returned to the cradle at last
Your final journey, far from home
held soft in the gaze of that land unknown.