Like Salt and Smoke

I'm blaming this poem on the moon...and other muse-like murmurs.

The full-moon hid by drooping lid of midnight’s charcoal-tinted verge

Ignites a toll within her soul that rolls like sea-song’s glinting surge

Across stilled sweeps where moon-glow seeps from hoary heights to shadowed deeps

Her heartbeat feels the velvet heels of yester-reels in bounds and leaps

And transports her, through silver blur back to the murmur of a place

No tender tug to strip the hug as past and present interlace

To pluck heart-strings of peasant kings with feathers from the wings of Flight

Where boys and girls like noise and pearls tripped through Her World and out of sight

She tips the flask that melts the mask that humble task and smile defend

And lets the ink that poets drink become a confidante and friend

The march of time in stiff-starched rhyme ignites a pantomime of tears

That fills the arc of moon-brushed dark with spark and ash of yester-years

The language of our utmost love covets the perfect flow and form

But breaks through bars in salty stars and takes the silent night by storm

Where naught can quell the soundless swell where Thought is caught in the riptide

Of tick and tock and click and lock, of clocks and closing doors flung wide

The moon has slipped into the crypt of onyx-dipped oceanic wave

The quiet aches where muffled breakers crash across time’s fresh-turned grave

Where what we have must always brave the raven stave farewells evoke

To poke the art pressed to Her heart with stings that smart like salt and smoke

© Janet Martin