Suffixes

Her ethereal presence
Standing next to me
Lightness
Against my heaviness
Slenderness
Beside my mass
Fairness
Next to my darkening

I know that winds
Passes through form
Like breezes through lace curtains and
Sunlight shines through flesh
As through the sheerest gauze
Of fabric

And she stands with
Fluidness
Against my solidness
Softness
Aside my hardening

A calm landscape
Under a dark blue sky
A sparrow flying in the winds
Before a storm
Under low and heavy clouds
The ness of her
Against the ing of me

Histories

I watched her light a candle
And move in the weak light
From a bygone age

The flame so fragile
It leans and sways in air’s
Faintest motions

My burning love is a lamp
>From antiquity a pre-industrial
Hand-crafted artifact

An oil lamp of glass from Rome
Bronze from Carthage
A terra cotta from Athens

She smiles at me in a flicker
Of light and knows all my past
Like a life from Plutarch

A chronicle from Tacitus
An Annals from Leviticus a history
>From Herotodus

And me ignorant knowing nothing
Of her can only quote Ovid, Cattulus,
Hesiod and Gilgamesh

Lying in darkness with her
On Spring nights everything learned
Is forgotten

And yesterdays are so many
Shadows cast in the glow
Of the lamp light of love