Gilded hands and golden hair, I knelt
on the stair and shed a series of potentials,
all my gleanings, all my means bestowed
in one bright river undammed, given freely
on a promise of worth,
a hidden hope of return,
equivalence, some similar sacrifice.
But once we traded stone for stacks
you sounded me into a shelf, a memory’s memory,
its timeworn cover shut
before a series of smaller, metered dreams,
inconsequential as a slip of gossamer in a stream,
one raveling corner pebble-pinned.
These memory-minnows spin
in the same vortex as that inevitable
shear on the silent shore,
serrated before it was subverted, but not
subverted before it scarred.
My echo cycles there in the library,
burnishes persistent circuits storing
what I ceded, dreaming of an equal gift
and another end.
