Substrata

How like a ragged, worn and weathered tombstone,
The standing chimneys are of burned-out houses.
And how like ancient, papery skin,
The faded, brittle billets-doux of past romance;
The lines of praise, of love eternal,
And written in a heart-felt hand.
O, who’d have thought those inky lines
Would so outlast their fevered sentiment.

How like a severed limb, or entrails, drawn,
Spread out and splayed for public show,
The memory is of lost, past love,
Irrecoverably gone.
Yet still its echoes, phantom pain and phantom pleasures,
Repeat in benthic murmurs deep within the soul.

How like a palimpsest, the tissues of my heart:
Writ fresh today with new love’s tale’s enchantment,
With vast potential, possibility, adventures for imagining;
And still, barely below, beneath the thinnest of veneers,
Lie other tales, vestigial as textures etched,
Crazed and crackling webs,
Unforgotten wounds and scars and healing.