1 Evanescent

I am a cloud, and
She is the blue sky.

We danced together in the light of countless suns. The mountains were our playground, the plains, our rest. We stood in the tall grasses, feeling the wet earth beneath our feet. Feeling the life that crawls through the earth. I was life, and she was earth. We were communion.

Her eyes were the blue of sapphire lakes, her skin the hue of sand. She basks in the liquid gold of surf, a nymph carved by hands of men. Her song was that of summer seas, and she sang to me, light and sweet as the whispering wind. But it was not to be. Not forever.

The skies dimmed and the sun was shrouded. Storm's coming, and her song faded, a slurry of bated breaths, into the furious cacophony of gales.

It was my song.

The grasses floated in the gales, the mountains darkened, peaks in cloud, and the sky turned grey, the darkness of a coming storm. The howling wind beat on, ferocious. The song had melted into the shriek of gales. It was still my song, but as all songs go, it faded.

She was lost to me; our hands parted, and, groping, never touched again. The wall of clouds that I was not blocked her sight from my yearning eyes, and the distant peaks of gilded snow quivered with her pain. The shriek of gales wore on, and the sun's futile batterings had no respite against the implacable darkness. And light, as all light, was lost to blackness.

And my blood ran, seeping through to the earth, the weeping of my tortured shell. But the grasses turned greener, the air turned clear and dew-frosted in the morning, for not all tribulation had no good end. As they end, as all things end, the storm ended, and the dark clouds lifted, and there she was, untouched, clean, skin warmed by the glimmering sun, tan alien to her porcelain beauty. And I, I, was soaked to the bone, tired and filthy with rain, and I dared not come to her.

But she came to me, and I averted my gaze, for she was as changless as a fountain nymph and her eyes glittered a steely-soft blue. And I resisted the all-consuming urge to come to her. I knew, now, that the marriage of heaven and earth is damned by the face of God, I knew, that as the lions bray I would flit by like a lone summer while she endured the winds of winter. And as she stared at me, I stared back, stricken with all the ephemeral sorrows of the world.

Come back to me, her lips said, whispering the silent eaves of eternity.

I can't.

And our union, so young, was shattered, and I wept vanishing tears, my back ever on her, as her stricken gaze followed me. And my tears formed on her face, the holy rain of deities, shining as they slid like silken diamonds down her cheek and splattered on the muddy ground, adding, in their own way, to the splendor of life, the Universe's joy that dances across the eternal face of God.

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