The Sundial’s Sigh

The gate, a skeletal hand, creaks a dirge he knows too well—
A chorus of rusted hinges, a tale they dare not tell.
Beyond, the path unravels, a serpent choked with moss,
Its cobblestones now coffins for petals long since lost.

Here, the roses once unfurled like sanguine constellations,
Their perfume drenched in promises and lovers’ incantations.
Now thorns conspire in silence, their blooms reduced to bone,
And the wind, a ghostly minstrel, hums a dirge of stone.

He kneels where lilies curtsied to a fountain’s silver tongue,
Now dry as August sorrows where no requiem is sung.
The marble nymphs stand eyeless, their song a hollow ache,
Their lips still parted midverse for the dawn they could not wake.

A bench of splintered cedar cradles echoes of her laugh—
A sound like April’s first rain on some forgotten path.
Her shawl of lace and twilight once fluttered in this air,
Now moth-wing thin and brittle as the memories laid bare.

“Come back,” he tells the shadows, “if only for this hour—
The peonies still whisper where you planted them in power.
The sundial counts the heartbeats we swore it would outlast…
Why does its bronze still circle what the years have cast to ash?”

The garden does not answer. It breathes in root and rust,
In vines that strangle statues, in petals ground to dust.
A blackbird, lone dissenter, carves night into his coat,
Its cry a needle threading through the fabric of his throat.

He tends to phantom blossoms with hands that shake like leaves,
Pours tea for two in china cracked by decades of bereavements.
The steam ascends, a phantom, to dissolve in twilight’s sieve—
A ritual of absence he no longer believes.

Once, this earth spun hymns beneath their tandem tread,
When the world was ripe as peaches and the future lay ahead.
She’d name each constellation tangled in the yew,
And he’d swear he saw forever in the dewdrops’ transient hue.

But blight came soft as snowfall, a pallor on her cheek,
Then winter took the garden hostage, month by barren week.
Her voice grew faint as frostwork, her touch a wisp of breath,
Till silence claimed the sundial, and the sundial welcomed death.

Now decades fold like linens in a chest no hand disturbs,
Yet here he digs for fragments—a button, ring, or verb—
Unearthing only shards of clay, the roots’ indifferent sprawl,
And the weight of all the sunsets since the last he heard her call.

The moon, a pallid pharmacist, dispenses silver light,
Transforms the weeds to mercury, the stones to cells of night.
He stumbles through the thicket where her footsteps used to wave,
Each branch a clawed reminder of the love he could not save.

“Enough,” the garden murmurs through the beetle-choir’s drone,
“You’ve mourned the fruit, now taste the rind; you’ve walked these paths alone.
What good these vigils watered with the brine of yesteryears?
The past is but a thief’s shadow—it vanishes in tears.”

Still, he lingers by the fountain, where her reflection used to bloom,
And begs the dust to dance again in that forgotten room.
The stars, cold archivists, inscribe their stark decree:
“No key fits a door that time has swallowed by the sea.”

At last, beneath the yew tree where their initials bled to gray,
He lays her shawl, still scented with a ghost of lemon spray.
The earth, a patient creditor, reclaims its fragile loan—
His breath a frail mist fading into dark’s eternal moan.

Dawn finds the garden waiting, the sundial’s face still blind,
Its numerals worn to whispers by the chisel of the wind.
A teacup, cracked and empty, gathers frost upon the stone,
And the gate swings shut, unburdened, now the keeper’s soul has flown.

No epitaph is carved here, save the ivy’s green lament,
The roses’ thorny sonnets to a love they can’t prevent.
The world spins on, unwounded, in its orbit vast and grim,
While the garden keeps his heartbeat folded in a hymn.