The Mariner’s Vesper in Stone

The pillars, gaunt as shipwrecks bleached by sun,
Arch high to meet the dusk’s empurpled shroud.
Their capitals, once-chiseled tales undone,
Now weep in moss—time’s verdant, voiceless crowd.
Here, silence hangs its censer, thick with years,
And every step he takes reverberates a dirge,
As though the stones themselves bore salted tears
For loves entombed where sea and sky converge.

He pauses where the rose window bleeds its light,
A kaleidoscope of saints in fractured glow,
Their hues like sails aflame against the night,
Yet cold as depths where drowned men’s whispers flow.
A face he sees—or phantom of the glass—
Her lips a crimson pane, her eyes twin sapphire seas,
But when he grasps the air, the vision pass,
And twilight drinks her smile to starless lees.

O hollow choir of winds that chant her name!
Each gust a breath she drew from shores unseen,
Her voice once wove the tempests into calm,
Now etched in gales that scour his weathered scene.
He traces glyphs along the pews—her hand
Had sketched such marks in sand when tides withdrew,
But here, the carvings mock his lost command,
For time has turned her art to relic, cold and true.

A bell tolls thrice—not from the tower’s throat,
But from the abyss where sunken cities sleep.
Its knell resounds in bones adrift, afloat,
A siren’s dirge to drag him into deep.
He clutches at his chest, where hangs a locket—
Brass worn thin by storms and thumbprints’ ache—
Inside, a braid of chestnut, dusk’s first pocket,
Now silver-frosted, threads the night could break.

“O vault of heaven’s echo, grant me this—”
His voice, a rasp of rigging frayed by gales,
“Unseal the tomb where hours clutch her kiss,
Or let me drown within your stony trails!”
No answer stirs the dust-slung air but time,
Which drips from arches like a stalactite’s slow bleed,
Each drop a year he’s sailed this starless clime,
Each pool a mirror where her phantom’s lips recede.

Beyond the transept, shadows coil and twist
To form a path where moonlight dares not tread.
There, steps descend—a spiral none has missed
Who sought to trade their pulse for pallor’s thread.
He follows, drawn by whispers not his own,
Past crypts where bishops clutch their rusted keys,
Down, down to where the cathedral’s roots are sown
In waters older than the hands of seas.

The air grows thick with brine and rotted rope,
The walls now glisten, barnacled and grim.
A final door—a porthole rimmed with hope—
Creaks wide to reveal the tide’s eternal hymn.
There, in the chamber where the deep holds court,
She stands—or seems to—wreathed in kelp and foam,
Her figure woven from the moon’s report,
A mirage born of currents dragging home.

“You came,” she murmurs, voice a coral’s sigh,
“Though decades draped their chains upon your wake.”
He reaches, trembling, lest the dream deny
The touch he’s bartered soul and sky to take.
Their fingers brush—a shock of frost and flame—
But flesh dissolves to seafoam’s fleeting lace.
Her laugh, a bell buoy’s grief, repeats his name,
As waves within the walls erase her face.

The chamber floods with time’s insistent surge,
Saltwater rivulets claw his ankles, climb,
Yet still he strains to grasp her fading urge,
To resurrect the plundered prime.
The locket snaps—a braid unspools, descends,
A chestnut streak consumed by rising green.
He gasps a psalm of love that never ends,
As stone and sea conspire to veil the scene.

Above, the cathedral stands, impervious, pale,
Its spires piercing skies no mariner charts.
The bell tolls on, a heartbeat grown frail,
While in its drowned nave, two ghosts clutch shards of hearts.
And sailors, passing, swear they hear a tune—
A duet of loss, half-hummed by wind and weed—
Where gulls now nest in arches once hewn
To hymn a love that time nor tide could plead.