"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

The clouds above the beach betray no sign
Of scuttling sounds or rasping washes' echo.
They show the thousand lights of city-glow,
But stifle out the long-elusive lines.

Her absence on this night is twice as hard.
And as the hidden moon openly scoffs,
The cold awakening is slipping off,
And I fall asleep in Saint-Canard.

Without a moon to laminate the time,
I stare without a sense for where I am
And reach as someone would a phantom limb
For what presence pains this heart of mine.

The falling silence in the autumn eve
Still echoes what the summer's vintage seemed.
And I still miss you in my morning dreams
As daylight yearns beneath this dark country.

It is the echo of the ebbing tide,
The lulling storm, and earth's recursive strain,
The valley of a woman's hallowed name
That births alive what once was void inside.

How strange it is to think of no more moons,
And the only ever-fleeting waves.
I watch my unseen breath condense and fade
More visibly than these memories that loom.

And yet I watch its rise upon the air
Up to the window that once framed a face.
Now darkness has reclaimed the space
And blown the Brumaire twice as bare.

The incongruity is apropos,
That we are filled with such expectancy
Despite the spiritual vacancy
That luminates like neon our sorrows.

Since Christ holds high and proudly in display
The fullness of the hallowed wounds He wears,
The presence of the scars He always shares,
The empty place where flesh was ripped away.

And we no less are filled with loss in Him,
To find what gain there is for recompense.
The sky itself shut down God's face since
Deity bore all vacuity of sin.