The Artist’s Covenant with Shadows

Here dwells the sculptor, Alban, pale as lime
That leaches from the stones of buried time.
His chisel carves what tongues dare not confess:
The ache of hands that yearn, yet cannot press
Against the flesh of worlds that spin unheard,
While autumn’s breath etches each leaf a word.

The forest breathes in whispers through his door—
A chorus of the lost, condemned to pour
Their silver grief into his hollowed hands.
They mold his clay: these phantoms of the lands
Where roots drink deep from crypts of lovers sworn
To keep their vows beneath the crescent’s thorn.

One dusk, when mist unspooled its ghostly thread,
A figure came—no footfall stirred the dead—
Her gown the gray of unremembered storms,
Her eyes two pools where drowned September warms.
“I am,” she breathed, “the echo of your blade,
The sigh your marble leaves when light does fade.
Carve me a form to hold my wandering soul,
That I may weep where time cannot unroll.”

Three moons he toiled as birches wept their gold,
His tools baptized in phantoms’ liquid cold.
From alabaster veins her face emerged—
A requiem in curves, a dirge submerged.
Her lips half-parted to release the weight
Of centuries sealed in twilight’s granite gate.
“Now breathe,” she wept, “your warmth into my frost,
That I may live what Death’s embrace has lost.”

He pressed his palm to where her heart should bloom—
The stone flushed peach, the studio filled with gloom
As shadows clutched his wrists like jealous brides.
“You swore,” they hissed, “to dwell where light derides,
To bind your soul to art’s unending night—
Yet dare steal fire to gift this wraith delight?”

Her fingers twitched—opal and ash entwined—
A tear slid down, the first her kind had mined.
“Alban,” she sighed (and willows caught their breath),
“You’ve split the veil that sunders life from death.
Now choose: the pact that chains your hands to dust,
Or this—our frail forever, born of trust.”

The sculptor’s throat filled with the taste of graves,
Of silent looms and threads that bind the braves
Who bargain with the dark to hold one spark.
Her marble throat pulsed—dusk embracing dark.
He kissed the crack where heartbeat might begin,
And fed his breath to what the gods deem sin.

Her chest rose—splendor clad in mortal guise—
The shadows screamed. The forest closed its eyes.

When dawn’s first blade sliced through the web of hours,
They found his tools: cold steel devoid of powers,
His chisel snapped like hope’s abandoned spine,
And in the clearing where moonbeams decline,
Two statues stood—their fingers interlaced
Through stone and root, twin sorrows embraced.

His face upturned to hers, her lips half-creased
With words unborn, their tragedy pieced
From frost and fire. Where his right hand had sealed
Their fate, thick ivy coiled—a living shield
That pulled them earthward, slow as decades pass,
To sleep where vows and vanities turn grass.

Now wanderers who brave the wood’s thick tongue
Hear whispers of the choice forever wrung
From dusk’s clenched jaws—how artistry’s bright crime
Fell prey to that most mortal flaw: the climb
Toward mortal warmth in realms where shadows reign.
Their plinths still sink, two lovers bound by chain

Of root and rain, while in the hollows deep,
The sculptor’s ghost still wakes to hear her weep
Her stone tears down into the endless mold
Where art and heartbreak marry, and behold—
The truest masterpiece no eye will scan:
The burial of a man who dared be man.