Omnia Mea Mecum Porto Poem by Donald W. Hayward

So I held her closely
Her music was a whisper of perfume, pervasive,
Wondrous, like shadows dancing on a wall
In time, in space, to the beat, to the scales of a piano
These hallucinations I took with me when I left,
Those she took with her.

I used to think my life was a vast tabletop of dessert
But now it is just circular, repetitive and turning -
A desert I am passing thirty-three times a minute

There's a thin line of foothills
Unspooling from the center
All beating things are lost like
A diamond in Winter
And no one is dancing

Always she has been a foam of sine waves
Nothing angular or otherwise incongruous
Like a perfect sea of pearls, languid, a soft
Virginal coalescence of rounding

I must be a casual observer -
Give no indication that I am about to fall
While I am trying haplessly to enter
The radii of her moving shadow-wall
Where all the stark things fade

We, when our
Two velocities impinged on a plane
Intimately intersected, a brief chorus,
Like a slowly swinging lamp
Light and dark and light and dark
Were profiles in contrast, despite
My despairing refraction and lament.