On Turning Twenty-Five

I have loved and loved again.
And I have been in love and been in love again.
But the love that found me first finds me now,
As the anchor of cynicism heaves toward an older
.
Two of us sit on the skeleton of something long dead,
A crumbling foundation of what has long ceased,
Concrete and pale like the bones of an empty shell,
The flesh of it returned to the soil,
Dark as of some dream skewed and ridden with unfamiliar, tenuous inclinations,
My mind is clouded yet her words are clear,
But I do not hear each tone and resonance,
Her thoughts, instead, sift through me like a breeze scattering seeds,
In its wake the seedlings of ardor soundlessly flourish,
Each is pristine and silent like the wind pressing against us,
She speaks with her eyes,
Swimming with blue and seeking mine,
Time waits for us,
Nothing stirs,
We belong to no one,
But we are indentured to the moment.

Yet I have not felt so free.

I touched her as I would a glazed orchid upon an ancient, fabled urn,
And it stirs in me as if new blood,
Tracing all to my last nerves and washes over them,
There is no us here tasting the spring pollen,
Or the wet sweetness of young flora,
And grasping through the blind uncertainty of unfledged freedom,
There is us,
And no more,
Only to a moment do we belong,
Our hands mingling until joined,
The patterns of the earth shaded in the blue of her eyes,

But the morning sky breaks and we can no longer elude the passage of time,

We separate without a tomorrow,
Only tonight,
A night that holds us,
Then retreats so we may wander apart,
Leaving the moment bittersweet,
As a cleansing pain, a hopeless endeavor,
A joyless triumph.