Refraction.

Clovette XXVI

Her eyes catch mine,
And they hold one another for a moment:
Only a second,
But I hear her breath hitch,
And suddenly I can think of nothing else;
Just how privileged that air must be
To brush past those lips,
How abruptly it enters,
How it ought to be me...
I know it will be, shortly,
But it pains me to wait -
Each time that I see her, I can think
Of no other,
Forgetting past and present lovers
In the blink of a molten eye.
The look that she gives me,
The gleam of her lips
Beneath the dwindling light...
Each time that we speak, she seems awestruck,
As though it is the first time,
But I am no better,
Wishing to tell her everything
That I've told her before:
How perfectly her hands fit within mine
As we dance,
That she is never quite in keeping with the rhythm,
But I love her for it,
For the way that she smiles
With those lustrous jasper eyes,
For the coquettishly clumsy grasps at my body
As she missteps so innocently...
Her form, her figure,
The cadence of the words she says;
How I can only pretend that I am not
Wholly enraptured
By all that she is, by what she will be?
I may not know the future,
But some things will not change -
She is the star that guides me home,
That tells me where I am.
Her figure may change, as may her voice,
But these sins of the flesh
Are just a means of connecting our souls.
These mortal trappings may come and go,
But I have tasted the essence
Of her being;
We have been one another,
And perhaps there are still things
About ourselves
That we don't understand.
Still, we have learned to live,
To be the wretched things that we are
And remain eternally loved.
I shall honour her until my last breath;
She sears the pain, the chill,
From my flesh - these veins finally run hot
Once again, for it is her blood
That gushes through me.
It is her; she loves me as I never thought
I could be loved - it's in her eyes,
The hitch of her breath and the tenderness
Of her lips.
For so long, I could only dream
Of being loved this way;
For such a long time, this sort of love
Seemed to just be a thing of myth,
But now we are each other,
Now we are the fairytale
That we never thought we'd have.