A Midsummer Night's Dream

I stand on the veranda in the moonlight, soaking in the warm midnight air. Above me there are stars, billions and billions of stars, shining their diamond hearts out in the velvet sky, tossed merrily across the heavens like laughter. I don’t see them. Below me the breeze whispers softly through the heavy-laden branches of the orchard; speaks to the leaves, all dressed up in yellow and red and ready for their Autumn dance, back and forth and back and forth on the late summer air to the bright green carpet below. Nightbirds call softly to one another, their songs somehow the more beautiful in the magic of the midsummer night. I don’t hear them. I am caught up in her.

She walks in beauty, in calm serenity out of the warm glow breathed out by the French doors that lead us here from within. She is a poet, and as the prose goes spilling down every gentle curve of her being that single word repeats itself again and again from dreamer’s sparkling eye to danseuse’s pointed toe: beauty, beauty. She is a dancer, every step in perfect time with a rhythm she alone can hear, every movement sweet and soft and slow, like honey poured from the pitcher onto my eager tongue. I cannot take my eyes from her. She is Helen, she is Persephone, she is my Portia and my Desdemona and my Laura and I cannot take my eyes away. Why would I? Why ever would any man want to see anything, anything at all but this goddess who stands before me all shining like the very heart of a midsummer night’s brightest star. A question of no moment. I do not care.

She speaks to me. I speak to her. Soft nothing words. Beautiful words. With her in my eyes and in my heart I can sing like Thamyris, I can speak like Erato. And she loves it. And she loves me.

There are diamonds at her breast, echoing the sky in clear, icy brilliance. They are cold against my chest as I take her in my arms. I pull her closer. In her eyes there is an infinity, a boundless, irrational endlessness, dark and clear and wonderful; and it is full of her, and it is full of me. I am lost, a beautiful, incredible kind of loss that feels like finding somewhere you always believed in but never let yourself hope was real.

Somewhere below, an apple falls from a low-hanging limb. She calls me a hopeless romantic, and as she fades into the air and I open my grainy eyes I tell her no, I’m not hopeless, because every night I have you.