Etched on Stone

My face against the cool hard stones rests
While eyes closed, I feel the hours tick in lurid slowness
My torture prolonged, my fear now an old friend
How alone I should be without this nightly ritual.

A breeze that chills lifts the hair from my brow
It gavottes in grisly whorishness beneath my thinning cloak
Threadbare where once finery would have reined
When candlelight shone on feasts and cups of gold.

I pause
to allow myself a memory of daylight jaunts
down hillsides of green bracken fronds
Where skyscape canopies of branching leaves
wove tapestries
to rest guardian angels between healing flights.
And I held a basket of queen Anne's lace
in fingers plump, not these pallid ringless claws
I held my lover's hand and he my heart
Two lives as one for eternity....
A tear escapes

Soon I shall have to rise and slowly creep
Two tombs I have carved from the ruins of this house
where once my sapphire-eyed groom prepared a home.
Where now behind wreaths of garlic and honeysuckle I cower.

Behind the stone fountain of trickling running water
I lie curled in this windowless bedchamer, though no rest comes here
While like the foul wind come his howling promises and entreaties
Some day soon his strength shall be returned.

Some day soon my will shall surely give way
and loathsome memories of love convince me to abandon reason
I will sing harmonies to his tune of longing
I will free myself from this midnight prison and gladly embrace what comes.

I will glide down steps of stone where family names are writ
A line dating back through the ages from and into dust
I will pass the painted eyes of hollow ancestral stairways
who will watch while I pry my lover from his lying place.

And perhaps that day I will don my wedding clothes
in like form to those in which I buried him
Give in at last to his promises of immortality
For a moment, to feel longing so intense, again
to feel....

My eyes I know will fall at last upon the headstone
and there will be no suprise in its additions
our names will be entwined together there forever
without souls, cast out, the age-scarred stone our only testimony.