The rivers are bronze against a blue sky,

curling across a landscape of deep green…

the hills are pale mounds risen from your eyes

and your lips cusp the dawn with subtle sheen.

The skin of clouds is white as your fingers,

fluxing above the heat of purple veins,

the scene is armored by a depth that lingers

though you have dimmed within cold autumn rains…

The afternoon is thick with golden light,

as if honey slid down from the clear sky

in rivulets of sweetness thick, in flight

as though songbirds who live, like love, to die…

I am jealously enamored of your pale, deep almond eyes,

your slender reed waist, buried in the water where my soul dies…

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