Frost From Fire

I put my love's bones in the black furnace,

watched the roaring fire like Jonathan Edwards

once described flailing fear for the school children,

or maybe it's a sermon of John Owen, which instilled in my soul 

a despair, eyes-of-a-bird hollow.

And so I thought of calmer fires:

winter fires, camp fires,

or even the high fires of Wuthering Heights

which also roared, 

but with a wild dance.

These were not the Puritan abominations that sent

screaming angels to heaven;

and I thought how different the same

transition from lightning to death,

entropy turning life to black,

warmth to new soil,

and was that difference simply an overflow?

I would say I want to open my mouth,

take in light by the starful

until I'm burned into a new being...and yet

I stretch these thoughts back around

to once again walk the forest paths,

chilled night paths, with my love

as she flowed like water through the crackle

of leaves under an old moon.

I held her hand when life was possible,

and that memory calms these modern anxieties,

takes me briefly back to The Grange, where I remind myself

I'm not and never have been Edgar,

but nor am I Heathcliff 

...or Lockwood.

How might the plot have been different

had instead of Edgar Linton there was 

Edgar Allan?

“Catherine! Catherine! At my chamber door!

I walled up memories in the wine cellar;

Help me forget my love, this inner war,

And forevermore not speak of lost Lenore.”

And so I am...a ghost without a raven;

I walk the moors, always in between

the settings of this fairy tale

long after the author's spirits went

to rest quietly in the earth.