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Moving Past the Dream
Polaris reigns
in a house of tragic beauty,
pilots me,
like the ancient ones,
northward,
upward and inward,
but the weight of us—
all the years huddled behind us—
keeps me living inside you, even
on this night.
I want to see it
through your eyes
once again, to rise
out of our
withering memories,
to see God even in frail
branches, dripping
and writhing,
to radiate life like
the first light
on the first stirrings
of the world,
like on those days
I harvested
your adventurous love
as it alighted on
everything
and I swore you were
all my suns and moons . . .
for one borrowed season,
for one waking dream.
Now here on the feathery
outskirts of a lifetime—
too short to know you—
we dissolved into mirages
of yesterday
or spirits so familiar
that everything is said
before we speak
and words become
soulless echoes of the
conquerors they once were.
But now in my gilded
and hard-earned winter,
a new paradise comes down.
Everything true is here:
a new love, cloaked
and steaming on snowdrifts,
faint explosions to the
beat of a moon
that is equal to Heaven
but walks beside me,
and it's a romance
as real as roses
and other red clichés—
a soft and lonely fire
too regal for the earth,
a wispy gateway to
unbroken joy,
even long-lost power,
enough to fill these ancient
and never-aging arms.
Into the mirror of
everything of worth,
to every place, unexplored
and absolute and . . .
real,
I have, at last,
arrived.
Patricia Joan Jones
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