The Mariner’s Ascent

Yet memory’s flame, though faint, refused to die:
A cottage perched where seabirds wheeled high,
A woman’s voice, soft as the twilight’s hue,
Whose whispers once the crashing waves outdrew.
“Return,” she pled, “ere autumn’s gold turns gray,”
But fate’s grim winds had swept his heart astray.
The sea, his mistress, claimed him for her own,
And left her weeping, tremulous, alone.

Now marooned far from brine and battered wood,
He scales the crags where ancient sorrows brood.
Each step a dirge, each gasp a fractured prayer,
He climbs to flee the specter of despair.
The mountain’s heart, enshrouded, calls his name—
A siren’s song transmuted into shame.
“What solace waits in yonder frozen throne?”
The cliffs reply with echoes turned to stone.

Three nights he toiled, his bloodied trail impressed
On slopes that mocked the anguish in his chest.
On dawn’s fourth blush, a figure carved from air—
A phantom veiled in snowflakes, pale and fair.
Her eyes, twin pools where all his yearning drowned,
Her tresses, frost-kissed, with the stormwind crowned.
“Dear wife,” he choked, though reason bade him doubt,
“Has mercy led thee here to guide me out?”

No smile relieved her lips of sorrow’s stain;
Her voice, a distant bell o’er frozen plain:
“Not flesh, nor spirit bound to mortal pain,
I am the shadow love could not retain.
Thou sought’st the depths, my anchor cast aside,
Now face the summit where thy heart resides.”
She vanished, leaving but a single rose—
Petals of ice that wept as winter froze.

Through blighted vales where shadows writhe and twist,
He pressed onward, by grief’s sharp spur dismissed.
The gales, like furies, lashed their bitter spite,
Yet still he climbed toward the elusive light.
“If this be penance for the paths I trod,
Then let the ice absolve me, steeled by God.
But if ’tis love that drives me to this end,
Why doth the peak its sanctuary rend?”

No answer rose but shrieking winds that spun
A labyrinth of snow, where all seems one.
His mind, unmoored, beheld delirious sights:
Her loom, half-woven, by the hearth’s last lights;
Her hands, once warm, now blue as twilight’s kiss;
Their unborn child—a dream dismissed to abyss.
“Was it thy ghost that steered me to this ledge,
Or but my guilt, dressed in thy visage?”

At last, the summit cracked its stony maw—
A throne of hoarfrost, rimed with nature’s law.
There, twined in rime, a locket’s glint betrayed
The portrait Time himself had not erased:
Her face, unchanged, still kind, still brimmed with trust,
Though salt and years had turned its frame to rust.
He clutched the charm, now sharp as reason’s blade,
And wept for vows betrayed, for debts unpaid.

“O hubris, born of waves that scorn the shore!
O love, that bends not when the tempests roar!
I chose the depths, yet ’tis the heights that slay—
The mount, not sea, hath ta’en my soul away.”
The locket slipped, through fingers numb and frail,
A silver spark swallowed by the gale.
With final breath, he cursed not earth nor foam,
But gazed where cottage lights might yet call home.

Beneath the stars that never learned his name,
The snow embraced him, purged of wrath or blame.
Some say the peak, when thaw’s first tears are shed,
Repeats his oath to winds that mock the dead.
While far below, where waves caress the sand,
A rose of ice melts slow upon her hand—
Two relics of a pact the fates untwined,
Two souls, one mount, one sea, forever blind.