Le Cygne

Synesthesia

It's snowing tonight,

Spitting soft sparkling flakes against the window pane.

I wonder if it knows what it brings to the surface as it falls.

Does it see the way your eyes lose focus?

Does it feel the rapid beating of my heart?

Surely, it must know what it's set at our feet.

We can't help but go back to nights back home

Where the snow clung to your hair and the cold

Tinted your cheeks pink, froze your fingers,

And forbid warmth from ever fully seeping

Into your bones before it returned to embrace you.

We retrace our steps to rooms tinted red,

Hidden in corners speaking softly in tongues nearly forgotten

With no promise of anything more than each other.

Death was never more than a breath away

And it yearned so for us to meet it. 

Our wild, rabid hearts took hold of us and

I vowed never to let death have you

In the same breath that you swore to offer yourself in my stead.

Self-sacrifice swam through our veins like blood;

We were not afforded the luxury of preservation.

We lived like the Earth herself wanted to swallow us whole,

We were nothing more than hearts and fear, hands and unclear intentions

With an iron will to survive. If love existed there, it clung to life somewhere between

A stolen kiss and lingering touch, dripping from a bloody nose and swirling

Down the drain with a torn suture and a bullet fragment, pulsing like a heartbeat

Under blossoming bruises and settling to sleep between our bodies in the dark,

Sighing contempt in the space left among carelessly intertwined limbs in a bed

Made for children who weren't supposed to make it this far.

The fog over your eyes fades, and I watch from outside myself

As you cup my face in your hands and whisper in a tongue nearly forgotten

For me to come back to you, far from red rooms and the cruel clutch of mortality.

In my chest, my heart slows as you smooth a thumb across my cheek,

Swiping at a tear we'll both deny and kissing my nose.

The memories fade like the final notes of a song; lithely, steady, like a pirouette.

We will huddle in a bed far larger than it has need to be,

Warm as the snow blankets the world outside and content in the fact that

Here in this moment, we are safe from the biting cold, the sting of bitter memories.

Do you think the snowfall can see the way your eyes dance like stars?

Do you think it can feel the steady beating of my heart?

Surely it must know what it's set at our feet.