In the Twilight Mist

In the twilight mist

there was a halo,

neither the sun, nor the star, nor the mirror.

You spun,

the most nameless echo,

in the corner of my gaze.

(Were you there?

Or was it a reflection of a memory that lacked the power to exist?)

The echo fell silent, and

the sun fell.

Only the window remained,

an empty frame,

and I,

inside the frame,

without you, without light, without name.

In the frame of the window,

no one was there,

except the mist,

and a distant echo,

which came from behind a thousand curtains of ash.

No,

you were there—

or a shadow of you,

a warm shadow that had fallen

into the yellow ring of a nameless thought.

The sun?

No,

a fiery orb

that had fallen from my sky

into the heart of a cracked vase

beneath the window.

I opened the window frame.

To the memory.

Ashes flowed,

and the mist cut the throat of the flower.

I close the frame,

and you return

with an era of colors,

spinning in my mind

without saying why.

In the frame of the window,

everything repeats.

No,

everything

forgets itself.

The lost song

in the frame of the window

was the mist.

And the mist was the frame itself.

The silent mist,

the mute mist,

the soft turn of a golden echo

that did not know which thought it would open.

The red flower had fallen,

not on the earth,

but within a mind forgotten by itself.

The sun?

Or a trace of a distant fire,

which in a fragment of a dream, was extinguished

before the morning could rise again.

I opened the window frame,

but the mist

spun again in the ring,

and in every turn,

a shadow was born that was not like you,

but knew you.

In the frame of the window,

in the frame of the window,

in the frame of the window…

In the sunset of everything that is not,

it spins again

in an endless ring.

Were you there?

Or just the memory of you,

a lost presence that never existed?

The burning yellow of memory,

in a mind turned to ashes.

Beharré Zarabie