Ignoring the late-December song birds,

I watched the stagnant puddle

Stretched across the muddy lane

Where we made our final walk, and turned to you.

That familiar kind of beauty now seemed plain:

Your skin blotched. Your forehead bloated.

I turned back to the mud, inhaled the stench,

And thought, “You disgust me.”

 

And as though it was a mired lane to Damascus,

Not to the sandstone Cotswold hostelry

Where we’d reached catharses of love,

I felt this sense of certainty

That this was the end. I knew your deepest being

And it bored me: The Platonic Form of Borderline Personality.

It was like in the beginning,

When you seemed sent from above,

 

When your eyes reflected my own soul back at me

And when anything “off” – your occasional childish voice –

Any heart-quickening evidence that this was not sublime

Was buried in the sureness that this was destiny,

That Zeus had split us before time.

And life was as clear as that mid-winter sky.

It’s easier that way

And it was easier that day in late-December;

 

To bathe you in mud and stagnant water.

Untangling the nettles and budding flowers,

Their subtle textures, their scents,

Would have meant shivering with chaos.

I breathed-in that stale stench

That brumal morning 

And looked at you again.