Dance of the Fleeting Hour

Dance, dance, dance to the light of a thousand moons, each smiling down imperceptibly, an audience marveling behind the veil of night. The muses count beats into your ear, whisper rhythms through your limbs, and for a moment, music strums through pulsing sinew. But dance is not only a heartbeat of steps and twirls; it flows as sweet seduction through veins, igniting fires of passion in the arcades of your inner corridors. It sweeps through the barren ballrooms and forgotten chambers of your heart, bathing your spirit in ephemeral moonlight. So dance and forget for a moment your body and this fleeting hour, listen only to the melodies echoing through the recesses of your weary mind. Take the hand of a fading shadow, of a lonely ghost, and sway to the rhythm of midnight.

Windswept Gossamer

There are certain breezes that are neither cool nor warm, like kisses of air they flutter through fallen leaves and swirl in eddies around faded footprints. In these breezes, threads of gossamer hover, fragments of a forgotten home long abandoned. They long to feel again the waltz of slender legs upon their bedewed surface, long to pay homage to those tiny feet that wove with careful tenderness their intricacies. They have forgotten the weight of those dancing legs, forgotten the colour of the body to whom those legs belonged, forgotten all but the clarity within their beloved’s mirthful eyes. Now they float upon spring breezes, condemned to solitude and to memory. If the spring wind had eyes and ears, and perhaps it does, it would hear the soft murmurs of windswept gossamer, the whispered melodies of lost love.

Ruins at Knossos

Sunlight touches with tentative fingers crumbling walls that once stood proudly. A square of gold on creamy beige, a pool of light in shadow. Footfalls echo in empty rooms. Here, thousands of shuffling feet once scuffed against packed earth, sending motes of dust into a dance. Nothing dances now, except for red figures painted on peeling walls, their breath forever bated, their feet suspended three feet from the floor. A throne sits in a silent chamber, waiting for the return of a long-dead king. Waiting for the return of music and laughter, waiting for a day when its surrounding rooms might fill with voices again. Just once. Just once perhaps one could call the mass of rubble, Knossos. Knossos of Crete. Knossos of Minos, king of ghosts, for that is all that remains of his subjects now. But if you listen in those illuminated light wells, if you pause and watch the dust rise and settle, you might hear him whisper, “I am not a myth.”

From Observation

Sunlight blurs all sharp edges, all harsh memories. All dissolves in sunlight and dissipates into motes of gold dancing among shadows. Upon these shadows, leaves fall like flakes of paint falling from forgotten paintings. Red, gold, and remnants of green; they colour the canvas of soft earth. Against these falling leaves, the sky seems bluer still. There is a certain brightness in autumn skies, a certain clarity. A blue so vividly blue, I squint my eyes to watch clouds sail across the celestial seas, though I wish I could keep them open, if only to commit each shimmering detail to memory. Time passes as clouds do: clouds shift and disappear behind trees and shadows, leaving me to wonder if they ever passed at all.

Talking to Mars

A warm wind sweeps through fallen pine needles as they dance around my feet. The air is kissed with memories of summer, but the night sky is unmistakably autumnal. Perhaps millennia ago,  our ancestors learned the subtle difference between summer and autumn, and reminded their children not to long for the sweetness of summer nights when winter was just a few daydreams away. So they remind me still, a child gazing at their glittering eyes through the only bridge of time we know. In a corner of speckled sky, a red star glints at me; the mark of Mars like an insignia in the blue of midnight. I have never wished upon the red flicker of Mars, and surely the god of war grants no wishes to a dreamer like me, but I whisper a wish anyway, just in case he feels a certain sympathy tonight for the race that has forgotten him. Or perhaps my wish is another way of telling him, “I still remember you.”

Porcelain and Eyes of Indeterminate Colour

“Why do you smile so often?”

“Because if I do not, I will forget the part of myself that knows how to smile; I will forget that I ever knew happiness.”

Petals fall from skies of palest rose. If this is a dream, I would linger until rays of morning sun stir me from my sleep. If this is a dream, I would bargain with the gods of illusion for more time. If this is a dream, winter sunlight would warm my fingertips, and winter skies would be bluer than the mornings of my memories. In which realm does happiness last? In which realm do petals blush eternally? If eternity exists, I would reside in its corner of a single hour, the indeterminate hour of spring twilight and summer evenings. Perhaps then my porcelain heart whose gossamer fractures threaten to widen still, might beat again. Perhaps then, my eyes whose glistening sheen renders them an indeterminate colour, might smile again.

 

Parallels

Beneath the trembling currents of a lake kissed by an evening breeze, another realm resides. The twilit sky takes a paler lavender hue beneath that shimmering surface, and a separate god whispers across those dimming skies. Silhouettes reflect and multiply; fallen leaves dance in kaleidoscopic patterns between the last muted rays of sunlight. Silence reigns in that other world; if memories could live again, they would live there, just beyond the touch of my fingertips. As always, the further I reach into those depths, the more they fade before my glistening eyes, until all I see is my own reflection with an expression I do not recognize.