Amber , she intones, and repeats, amber . Neither luminescent fault-spiked caramel nor silent, opaque coffee grounds, these crisp stars in night sky draw my eye, my sight slightly marbled by desire. I thought I'd lost like an old skin, a lover set beside me in silver, to whom I was bound and released, as from a watery deep brown. I've climbed to err on autumn earth upon a crust of papery leaves and spoken what I must, yet conversations never end when words wound inside begin to surface through agents like developing prints, the way history seeps into the present hour with purposes and meanings long turned sour. A photograph appears darkest, tree limbs serrating sky, where the negative is nearly transparent.
Chaos moves into form while rigid design breaks like a maelstrom.
Beneath cathedrals, bridges, each grand structure lies the grave of a worker, a reversal. Where the world is torn like a ticket, in the garden of betrayal worn raw, I find the oldest amber grown white and remember the scars in the belly of love. On a train, an illusion of motion seems real. You cannot be sure which one of you is slurring away or toward, as each adjustment creates another, and for every degree of distance opening or closing, there enters a ghost, a note held too long in the mind to be tuneful. You cannot tell whether your train is moving or still.