Elegy for Ashes Unwed

Third autumn since he first beheld her form—
A silhouette that made the ruins warm—
Her hair a comet’s breath, her eyes two springs
Where drowned stars hummed of half-remembered things.
“Thy name,” he pled, as gutters wept their rust,
She answered through the marble colonnade’s distrust:

“I am the echo when the bells fell mute,
The shadow’s blush on fruit too long past ripe.
Seek not my lineage in time’s withered book—
I dwell where hourglasses dare not look.”
Yet in her palm he placed a vow of words,
A lexicon to outlive screech-owl birds:

“By crumbled arch and fungus-crowned plinth,
I’ll love thee past the scything of all mirth,
Till Thames forgets to mirror broken skies,
And stones grow wings to flee their own demise.”
Her laughter shook dead leaves from yew trees’ hair—
“Sweet bard, what oath survives this poisoned air?”

Through vaults where spiders wove their silk dirges,
They traced the corpse of streets, past shattered verges,
Her touch left lichen blooming blue as veins,
His quill transcribed the rain’s archaic pains.
In scriptorium of roofless walls,
They built a lexicon where nothing falls—

“Behold,” he cried, “our cathedral of breath!
No rot shall blight this psalm we forge from death.”
She cupped his face—her palms smelled of lost wars—
“Thy verses stitch my soul to fleeting hours,
Yet hear the gears beneath our cobblestones—
The clockwork heart that grinds all promise bones.”

First frost came clad in judge’s ermine robes
To crown the alleys with its crystal globes.
The poet’s ink now faltered, thin and sere,
As unseen jaws gnawed through the atmosphere.
“Belov’d,” he gasped, “my thoughts like sickened doves
Crumple mid-flight—what vandal steals our loves?”

Her fingers traced his brows’ storm-gathering crease—
“Thy curse demands its tithe of stolen peace.
Didst think sweet sonnets could outrace one’s fate?
The well’s run dry where gods brew mortal hate.”
He clutched her waist where ribs through velvet showed—
“Then let us drink this darkness as our road!”

Too late—the ground sighed open like a lung,
Disgorging clock hands, tarnished and far-flung.
From iron intestines, gears reared up blind,
Mechanical serpents of a murdered mind.
The city screamed in rusted agony,
As cogs devoured light from every tree.

“Run!” shrieked the muse, her form beginning to fray,
“These teeth care not for sonnets or ballet!”
But poets schooled in love make paltry sprinters—
He watched her dissolve to smoke and winter’s splinters,
Her final words engraving through the smog—
“Forgive the vow I broke to spare thy fog.”

Now lone he walks where pavement cracks conspire,
His every step sprouts barbed-wire lyres.
The curse gnaws on, immortal in its maw,
Each dawn finds fewer words to break the law
Of entropy—his last rhyme, scratched in mold:
“Love dared not stay where even ghosts grow cold.”

Beneath the moon’s unblinking cataract,
Two shades meet where the clockwork still enacts
Its pantomime of union without bliss—
His phantom lips, her fabricated kiss.
The ruins nod—they’ve seen this script before—
A poet’s heart makes splendid metaphor.