The Canticle of Crumbling Stones

He bears no lantern but the moon’s cold eye,
His boots disturb the silence of the dead,
Each crumbling arch a testament to years
That gnawed the tapestries to threads of dust.
Here, in the hall where banquets once roared bright,
A mouse now crowns itself on silver crumbs,
And frost has scribbled epitaphs on glass.

Oh, linger in the gallery of ghosts,
Where portraits peel to reveal darker stains—
A youth’s face stares, though not from pigment’s lie,
But from the mirror of the poet’s soul.
“I knew this place,” he murmurs to the air,
“When laughter hung like roses from these beams,
When her voice spun its gold into my verse…”

(Her name? A syllable the wind has stolen,
A vowel lost where echoes dare not dwell.
Yet in his veins it pulses, phantom-sweet,
A melody that razors every nerve.)

Three nights he wanders, tracing corridors
That coil like verses in a madman’s psalm.
The tower stairs, a spiral of regrets,
Lead him to chambers where the spiders weave
Their webs in patterns of forgotten vows.
A desk, carcass of oak, holds parchment bones—
His younger hand once scrawled forever here,
Now eaten by the patience of the void.

On the fourth dusk, as shadows knit their shroud,
A footfall answers his—yet no soul treads.
The air grows thick with jasmine’s ghostly breath,
And there, beneath the arch where moonlight bleeds,
A figure stands, her gown the gray of tears,
Her face a blurred reflection in Time’s well.

“You’ve come to dig the grave of what we were,”
She speaks, her voice the crackling of old wax,
“To kiss the corpse of love beneath these stones.”

He reaches, but his hand parts only smoke—
Yet in that void, a thousand yesterdays
Surge like a fever: dances in this hall,
Her fingers tracing sonnets on his palm,
The oath they swore where now the nettles thrust…

“I’ve bartered sleep to walk these ruins deep,
To find the moment Fate unstitched our thread—”

“Poor moth,” she sighs, “still beating at that lamp
Whose oil dried ere your cradle’s wood grew warm.
This castle is but time’s discarded shell—
Your ‘past’ a tale you’ve written on the air.”

Now rage ignites the pyre in his chest:
“If all is ash, why does your phantom walk?
Why does this place still bleed beneath my boots?
I’ll rebuild every stone with my own breath,
Replant the orchards where our shadows kissed!”

Her laughter, icicles on fevered flesh:
“Then write. Let’s see your pen defeat the tide.”

He seizes quill (from where? The desk was bare),
Inscribes the air with words of fire and root—
Let walls rise whole! The stones yawn, unimpressed.
Let dawn break as it did that final morn!
The windows stare, their eyes still filmed with dust.

Blood drips from nib now, scarlet mocking ink,
As stanzas writhe like wounded serpents born
From arrogance. The tower trembles, sighs,
And in its sigh, the poet hears the weight
Of centuries amused by mortal throes.

“You see?” Her form dissolves like steam on glass.
“The past is not a page, but prison bars.
You’ve chained yourself to graves that hold no names.
Farewell, dear fool. My love was but a leaf
You pressed between the pages of your curse.”

Alone again, with only rats as choir,
He claws at walls until his nails are moons
Of grime and blood. The castle drinks his pain,
Its stones absorbing cries as kindling.
Dawn finds him frozen in the chapel’s womb,
Before an altar where no gods remain—
Just his reflection in a tarnished cup,
A face now old beyond its mortal due.

“If I cannot rewrite, then let me cease!”
The chalice shards, a crimson kiss on throat—
Yet as his life leaks onto flagstones cold,
A final vision sears his drowning sight:

The castle whole, its banners laughing skyward,
Himself, a boy, plucking unrusted lyres,
And she—not shade, but flesh—calling his name…

Too late. The blood has scribed its ending here,
A period to his futile refrain.
The stones endure, well-pleased to host his ghost,
Another whisper in their endless sigh.

Thus ends the canticle of crumbling stones,
Where love and madness share the selfsame tune,
And all who seek to drink from time’s dry well
Find only thirst, and dust upon their tongue.