The Lovers (a story in three parts)

PRELUDE - THE LOVERS' CONTRACT

Theirs was a tale of fervent passion, a bond
which stretched from youth to age;
of confidences and orphic charms
not known before, nor understood by others.
Theirs was a story of uncommon union.

He gave to her inscrutable tokens of his love
which she kept hid in rosewood caskets.
He offered eloquent promises prescribed in verse
and tenderly she scripted them onto silvered silk
to line her walls and keep him close.

Braided tight into her fair hair were grasses
from the summer fields where they had lain
to seal their secret covenant.
Their souls were twinned and their hearts
were pledged beyond the grave.

TRAGEY AND MALADY

Measured days rolled into heated nights
and the hours were lost in reveries and congress.
But they did not see the mist descend nor did they
catch the smell of danger on the wind. Thus it was
that their embrace became their sad undoing.

She could not sleep for lack of sweet goodnights,
could not rest without the comfort of his voice.
This painful severance was the fateful cause
of her abandonment of hope and pitiful derangement.
There was no easy palliative for her distress.

THE ELIXIR

When season after season
had played longingly at her threshold
and need had echoed frenzied need,
she sipped a honeyed soporific
from the trumpets of forbidden mandrakes.

Nightshade’s dark powers flooded
her veins and swelled her senses,
until her phantasies parted the shadows
and remembrances of his lips
and potent limbs consumed her.

She stepped naked into the moonlight
where silver beams wrapped ribbons
around her breasts and thighs,
and she danced once more to his song;
swaying and pirouetting, spinning, whirling
she practiced ancient lovers’ rites.

But no alchemy could cure her of these
dark dreams nor sate her fierce desires
and so she sought him on the wedding bed;
reciting incantations she embraced illusions
in the air above her face and sweated
one last time in love’s insistent labour.