Love's Diagonal Poem by Patti Masterman

Our empty syncopation's are patiently ambushed
By restless margins of undeclared territory;
Shivering cymbals, entraining cloistered memories,
A nimbus inclining toward unredeemable quarries:
Refrains unimagined, of star-tipped dawns
Upon certain days of ritual, unbelievably worn.

Breathing dragons of fire-squandering meridians
Pour round water upon semblance's drowned emotion;
Cleave then to me, who cleaves to the last vestige
Of rarefied air, breathed by bellows-smothered centuries
When your foot trod the newly opened virgin earth,
And your hand hinged loves diagonal, even unto death.