Early or late you woke
to revive the waning fire.
Numb asleep I still could hear
splinter the shingle you broke,
against closed lids see flare
the flash as kindling took.
I was roused by sleight
and saw, crouching in a nimbus
of flame stirred up from embers
a sylph afire, a sprite,
the camber of your members
bathed in amber light.
***
No foreboding of separation here, so this is not an alba by the strict rules of that old Provençal genre. Also, its setting is predawn, the light pictured therein emerging from an open stove rather than through a window.
Such internally rhymed poems were unfashionable in the early 80s when the cult of sincerity ruled and artifice was shunned, as if the two qualities are contradictory. This little song was sent forth to multiple literary journals, to no avail. At one point it fell to serve as tinder in another fire as I passed through a periodic purge of my vanities. Fortunately, I retrieved it from an old typescript I had lost track of and can now revive the moment of incipient desire it celebrated. As we approach the end all we have is vanities, maybe all that memories are.