Most Tender Dance

Beneath the veil of heavenly dust,
I sat in snow, in whiteness spread —
upon the shelter of foliage,
white as a frost,
pure as a dead.

I watched a swan.
Among the reeds,
among their green and trembling throng,
immersed in silence, it withdrew
through stems too thin to hold it long.

Into the glare —
mirror-clear —
it disappeared.
It dissolved
in silver remnant,
tempered cold.
I choke,
yet breathe out — old,
and poke
a dying grace,
a slow resistance —
caress each other in persistence.
The deepest wounds restless learned,
among vertigo poppies burned.

Some unseen hand had placed them there,
a blood-red bouquet in the air —
or rather,
on that liquid face,
where sweetest lusting leaves a trace.
And all their grace —
a famine hour,
a hand that closes ere the hand is touched.
A flower withholding its remaining flower
for fear that giving might become too much.

From depth to height,
a madness claimed descending
where reasonable men stray.
Then I shall call mine —
an ascending,
and join the caste
that reason casts away.

The mechanism
of suppressing the feeling —
a phrase for a phrase,
a concept for a concep't.
Shall we suppress
the bare spring —
together?
How old the fleur —
how intimate precep't.

I sat in snow.
The weeks went by,
one after one,
a pale procession.
I watched them leave beneath the sky,
admiring two-faced flow condition —
its inconsistency,
prostration,
repentance of the thought's substan'ce,
the fullness of the life's frustration —
most tender dance
of
the
distan'ce.



Visual observer of melancholy,
Mad Kim

Verbal regurgitator of melancholy,
Liza Chernykh