- Etait-ce donc ceci ?
- Et le rêve fraîchit.
-Was it this?
-And the dream breaks afresh.
"Veillées I" -- Rimbaud
I am dreaming.
As rain comes down on me, matting my hair slick, molding wet folds of black cotton to my chest and arms, you are miraculously dry, standing in the sun.
You've always stood in the sun.
Your hair is the color of sand high above the tideline, sparkling summergold. Your eyes are still sea-gray, chilling your smile.
I have kept you like this behind glass, tucked in the pages of a much-loved book, framed in silver, folded away in a battered leather wallet, corners wearing white and thin even though handled by the edges. I have carried you with me. To San Francisco. To Chicago. To Paris.
I know you. I have known every inch of you. But only because I am dreaming.
I know the length of your fingers and the soft lines of your palm; the shape of your nails and how they seemed to me like opal shields, gleaming with wet adularescence, the color of the wind in April, your touch like spring.
You are every image that I want to capture but only cheapen with words.
You have been every golden-eyed heartbreak, every dark lady, every woman who did not tread softly upon my dreams. I was my beloved's. My beloved was not mine.
Your lips have grazed mine a thousand times in the waxing anticipation of a kiss that vanishes like so many stars in the thieving dawn. The morning and its scarlet and purple curtains of damnation: the day chained to memory.
But here you are again, ribboned in diaphanous sunlight as the rain comes down on me in cold waves. There are the smooth curves of your legs. And there is your hand touching my cheek, your lips the color of apricots, grazing mine awake to sharply curse the dawn and the disappearance of a dream.
Written May, 2011 to a girl that I've only dreamt of. Maybe one day I will find her.
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