The moonlight sweeps across your face

The moonlight sweeps across your face, silently, like some inaudible tide. She washes and washes at your boughs, at the lines of your strong features, carved deep, till it seems they are smoothed away, dissolved by sleep, and your face is the face of the moon.

Her tides have quietly carried you away. Sea dreamer, I wonder could I still count the times I have watched you like this on my fingers. Could I have mapped the course of this vessel in the lines on my hands, hands that trace your shadowed outline in the dark?

You breathe deep as if drawing me in and under the swirling warmth of sleep, but she does not come for me, does not claim me as she has claimed you. And I lie in the waiting darkness, shadowing your face like a cloud across the moon, illuminated for a moment before I am pulled on and gone.

My memories are like faded maps now, beautiful translucent pictures in my mind, but the lines are blurred I cannot find my way back to the places we were, the ones we were when we were there. They have shifted, subtly, sweetly, swept away by just the softest of rain. Gone are the blossoms that were falling on the day I left. Now with the scent of autumn coming on, the promise of cold bright nights that snap like frozen twigs beneath my feet, instead blooms the streetlights reflected on wet pavements where the shadows grow from out of the cracks.

I thought better than this, better than to come here in this way. As I was spiraling home through the air, down, descending down, I thought that memories are sweet; hands held beneath the table, your eyes creased at the corners, the scent of the flowers you gave me with that smile on your face telling me there was more, but they should be kept that way, preserved like a butterfly behind sheet glass and kept away from these changing winds.

But as I watch you tonight I know why I had to come here again and sail with you a while longer, you who just held me when the world shook and illuminated the shadows with your smile.