I often contemplate the character of eyes,
the diction between the syllables among amiable sorts
beginning love after a fall of leaves,
when it isn’t spring nor is it a passionate summer.
When gray skies mix in or match
the ebony of darker hearts or bleaker moods,
love does draw a bolder streak
captured for the sickness it is sometimes named
and lasts its longest as if weather were warm.
To longer shadows where pain may flow,
or to fallen leaves when if turned over
one finds a puddle that failed to evaporate
and one finds their reflection at its most somber.
To those letters drawn with longer trails
from the pen being used to remind a heart
that the writer’s being can mirror itself
even in an emptiness, a vast silence
of a coated, immaculate page.
A man folds a book closed,
draws over its pages as it were curtains,
much reminiscent of that pair of lovers
warming not to the brightness of flame,
though to everlasting, beating hearts.
A faint reminder to that leaf,
or that looseleaf given words, presented with
promises that were either fulfilled or
forgiven with the melancholy
of an autumn’s wilting day.
For those hairs graying upon a woman’s head
will match those clouds of overcast,
while her grateful lover will rekindle a first moment
after the never that never arrived
as hearts, when warm, always survived.
Modern Romanticism 