Poetry Wakes

Sunlight clung to my cheek
like dust to a monarch's wings,
delicate and sheer.

Breezes spoke secrets,
whispered to the moon to climb.
Her face was elegance, for poetry wakes
in the night and wanders, seaward.

We strung cockles on a thread of dusk
and painted Van Gogh's Starry Night
in watercolors on driftwood limbs.

My ghosts were gone, blinking away,
night-blind, they left us,
alone.

In the peace of my forgetfulness,
with yesterday held within
the gauzy belly of the man-o-war,
you pressed your chest to mine.

Scarlet and coral swam against ebony,
and the monarch took flight, a fistful of
mother-of-pearl and salted sea spray.