Sonnet Sequence: Titania

As you say,
we are ill met by moonlight:
you come to take from me a memory that scrapes
and wakes my heart like emery.

I am off to gain the picayune light that will guard my treasure
while I slumber,
dreaming of the spicy winds that number in thousands
underneath the golden moon.

The farthest steppe of India is strewn with the sprinkles from the holy river,
where elephants wave ears,
and ragas twist like emerald snakes around the arm and wrist.

These are lies my conscience can deliver,
though this were never India.

Because she is,
it is.

It was because she was.

And because her love for me was fervent,
because my love must not be insincere,
I’ll keep what she took pains to engineer,
as a homemade present from a servant who was faithful,
as a faded letter from a love who left for someone better,
the scribbled picture of a grown-up child.

Among the sand dunes,
as the wind whipped wild ocean waves along her body’s swelling,
we loved too far for me to leave her now.

I loved her more intensely,
knowing how I would lose her.

Passion is compelling eternal me to further her campaigns,
to care for every piece of her remains.