The Other Side of Midnight
In the solitude of the fragile moment
breathless, broken,
shattered into tiny pieces of the night,
my soul singing
her song, which had been a compelling fiction,
fell to silence,
as she dissolved and vanished from my sight.
Selah.
If I could speak freely of that hour
when love and loss met face to face,
I would hold my breath long enough
for the deeper anger to be known
and share the bread of this beauty
and drink the cup of bitterness
from which our mutual gratitude was born.
Love and loss were her precious gifts to me,
yet the illusion of her relentless hold
could only be dissolved by the ebb and flow
of holding on and then letting go
of what was real and what was not.
And then I recalled the forgotten day
when she danced upon the burning sand
and the ocean laughed and named us
“love longing for life but desiring death.”
This we were, and nothing more,
but of course, nothing less than this,
when we sealed our eternal love
and unconscious yet fated betrayal
with our first sacred, timeless kiss.
A ghost she was from the very beginning,
yet she turned the clouds into living stone,
gave the dark and formless unconscious form
and then entered me with her chilling breath,
first upon my face, then upon my heart,
yet her words were nails, her love a hammer,
pounding out a reluctant self-redemption.
Form without substance, shape without color,
just a blind, frozen, and fading projection,
the path upon which every lover must walk
to be crucified by his own heart’s desire.
How shall I describe the essence of My Love,
the goddess shakti who gave me birth
and by whom I have tasted an eternal death?
Sudden and vast unspeakable brilliance
annihilating me with her blinding light,
quickly, invisibly collapsing on itself,
leaving only ashes of tomorrow’s dream.
the glory of a dying, lifeless sun.
Sing me your song,
my precious springtime lover
Give me the melody
of your grief-stricken heart,
your consuming fire,
the deepest truth of all,
sabotaging lie that annihilated me
in the madness of
your impenetrable night.
You were the goddess
that fell from the sky,
shattered, scattered,
and dissolved into the earth
and yet never separate
from this one I call “I”
the silent sound,
and the groundless ground,
the path of chaos I have walked.
In the solitude of the fragile moment
lovers appear as a kiss upon your lips
but first as the dirt beneath your feet,
butterflies dancing upon an Autumn wind,
swirling through your trembling hands,
a melody melting into the silence of the night,
where everything we are is finally dissolved,
there, on the other side of midnight.
Selah.
Michael Sudduth
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