You found me in this river, swimming.
You found me in this ocean, the sea before the sea.

A virgin I watched, as waters lapped above me, the pool enriching the substance of my heat.

Misery was captured in the bubbles, foam perched beyond the horizon, distance haunting and calling me free.

I came, as one often comes, for dinner of delight; my appetite wrapped in folded crimson napkin; my supper less for cause than for circumstance.

For I wanted to dance, and with you I wished to breathe.

I came from the depths of the blue, no more familiar to this land than the sturgeon to the vine of the trees.

How I dug my feet in the sand, like a summer day that first kisses your forehead.
I moved, a child to this world, in a way I both recognized and denied, an innocence so refined.

I watched for you, a symphony to my senses, ripping apart my insides so that they fluttered out a butterfly of sorts, dancing about your grave stone and singing to the heaven’s lords.

I turned and danced merrily, your shadow still beneath, your image laid down in the earth’s grumblings.

You were vision.
You were sensuality.
You were the purpose for which I left my castle of the sea and stepped upon the land, less naked than guised in the wonderment of unfamiliar.

I shivered from the bounty before me, all decorated in the drapes of uncertainty, and I wished, with my delicate heart, to find you where you rested, a man of my waiting.

I whispered into the shells I carried: “Hello, my sweet beneath me. Hello, my land of man. Hello, my angel dreaming. Hello, my ember hand.”

And I twirled in the dress of satin white, knitted and laced, sewn with the grandest of merriment, the child I be.

In my youth I would dream you into existence and just be; you as my soldier true returned from where it was you went; me, your diamond carved for scarlet string draped around your nape.

And I would rest there, in my vision, my skin upon your skin, sparkling as if we’d both been kissed by father sun.

I’d rest and feel the beat from that of one I’d wished upon. A star wrapped into the golden skin of you. How you shined so brightly but dimmed enough to soothe me to the place of shore-light’s lullaby; woven to sleep by your gentle grace.

My gentle man you were, as I sat along the side of your shadow buried, embraced by the near presence of the name of you. So calm your ways, so free and without the weight of what this world does bring.

I harbored you there, inside of me, not once, not twice, but for eternity, in this mingled embrace.

Kiss me I dreamed you to say, and knew that the fire that grew was not a demon birthed but the essential purpose of my being.

For twin sparked twin and ember came, again and again, like the fire that shows his last light before dying to the night sky.

Take me, I sang, and you did.

I held you there inside my dream, my lips smeared with the grace of where you’d touched, my hunting seized, my search swallowed, my destiny claimed and staked where the hold once be.

No longer empty, I clung on to the hope of return.

No longer forlorn and broken, I edged my own self up around my edges and found one where two once stood.

For you had gone, and in your leaving left me half again, not less, but more in my making.

And still I sit here, the waters below me, my breath breathing, my will willing you forward.

But I find you not, this angel you be; I find you not, for forever is before me no more, only the ocean of endless tomorrow in which you exist not; neither ripped away from past or brought forward to future, in the cyclic cycle of new dawn after new dawn.

You are a wavering memory, wiped clean before tasted, swept out of the eyes before entering, and I am left wondering if you ever came or I wished it so to be.

Samantha Craft, February 2013