Sestina

A poem written around ideas from alchemy, analytical psychology, and Jungian archetypes

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Eternity as a matter was the substance of your breath
when you appeared with a radiant and steady gaze.
Plunging in the vast of the sea, your eyes became
a reflection of an expansive sky. In a moment of connection
when I couldn’t glimpse you all at once, I embraced terror
in a rout of dreams, the flame in your eyes that traverses the horizon.

I’ve often dreamed of you atop the horizon
with a flower reef, and lyre in hand. Your voice breathes
into existence what we intuitively understand, the corporeal terror
which arrests our human form, as we stare
into the eyes of one another. Let us forgo the folly of connection,
chemistry, geometry, the sciences, harbingers of what’s to come!

Let us advance toward the Spirit of what we might become: 
turn your gaze toward the celestial sphere above the horizon
where the waning moon rises and the solitary stars connect, 
algorithmic in shape yet infinite in scope. Between each breath
of light is contained a nebula of thoughts, reveries, and dreams, unseen
unspoken, having yielded to terror in the emergent processes of life.

What has been revealed through these processes of life? As love ferments— 
fed on phosphorescent leaves over a smoldering of crystals cut from the coarse shards
of emerald soil—its roots possess your illusion in all of its radiance, blinded
to its faults, like the rose seen from the perspective of the thorn,
fixed in its immediacy.
Piercing the air, golden filaments rain down refracted through a salt water surface, 
dissolving away into the depths, though the sun shines, fastened in the sky.

An array of colors blend in and out of shape—roses, lavenders, azures—they connect
And cohere, around a singular fluorescent vision, the full spectrum of devouring terror
rising forth amidst the flames, swelling and diminishing with each trembling breath.
I raised my gaze to confront the searing mass. I foresaw the coming 
seasons, the planetary view of endless horizon
opening to the nebula of dreams as the delta to the sea.

And when my eyes began to open to your reveries and dreams, 
when the hours took on the dimension of the moment I was joined 
with two eyes that have bound mine toward the fate of the horizon, 
where the waning moon rises amongst the constellations, and terror 
has ceased in its illusions, reality again, was born of our being.
I embraced the eternal, faithful to your lasting breath.