Connoisseur

I was right, after all this grime,
to take her at her word,
the sound of distant tide,
having lived through such a time:
the summer when our mothers died
and nothing else gave birth,
while furies stole our hell
three floors below the earth.
Knowing that no one travels well
anymore, or sits the season easily
with this much fire in the air,
saddened at first by the dark,
depressing dress she wears,
despite a passing hint of her,
a brief bouquet of rose and myrrh,
in the end, when we rise
to leave, both bodies and their sphere
move to our lips and crystallize
in the lush, familiar year
of the old nightmare—
after everything, still there.