CELESTE

I: BEAUTY DESCENDED

Her Friend gently

lowered her down

into the box she’d made.

Forever a resting space, three

eroding walls without

a floor and a silk veil

covering their descending place.

"I thirst," Celeste whispered

to her friend huddled in one suspended corner,

looking comfortable yet numb,

warm brandy poured over

her unadorned hair, dripping down slowly

over brow onto moistened lips

as she quietly hummed "Benedictus"

from Mozart’s dark, inspirited Requiem.

"I can feel the weight of a veil

I cannot see.

I feel it draping over me.

It covers, yet

the chill remains."

Her friend’s image darkened

into a death shroud which shimmered

like gray, spectral tree limbs

without substance,

opaque against one wall.

Joy floated up and through

the descending veil overhead.

And a mystery left with it:

that a soul meant for ascension

will breach the veil.

Kiss my lips but stay far away

was all she said.

Celeste stared at her in awe and pity,

her bones all out of joint,

knees arched over her fallen head

and elbows extended out for comfort

against the nearest wall.

"Why have you condemned me?

Taken my wings.

How will we rise

now that they are cooling ashes

spread over the dried, budless limbs

of an unripened tree?"

Her friend would not reply,

too proud to feel the loss.

The falling of beauty into despair

her only concern now. In fear,

Celeste wilted

among the thorns of fallen and falling roses,

wondering whether the rumors were true:

That soon after the winter snow

melted into spring streams,

April’s rebirthing rain would bring restoration.

II: FALLEN

Her spirit elevated by an unexpected flash of joy,

Celeste extended one hand down toward her fading friend.

For one brief moment, peace seemed to fill the polluted air,

and the veil puffed out like a wind driven sail gliding over uncharted waters.

But the rush of joy died and poured out like water

bleeding over burnished brick walls.

Her friend lifted her face with an awkward, unbalanced jerk,

the pale flesh on her cheek bones ebbing and flowing

with a sinister movement from high tides of bitterness

to the undertow of apathy’s resulting low tide.

Celeste watched her friend fade slowly away,

leaving only stained walls behind

to offer a twisted comfort and vindictive cover

from the pain of separation: a kind of living death

haunting her now with the forceful presence

that comes with sudden emptiness.

Despite the loss, Celeste felt the familiar rush

lift her.

Instinctively, she reached out to the veil above

but remained suspended below,

somehow feeling the downward pull

of a descended figure.

At the moment of her falling,

Celeste cried out "empty!"

Against the tyranny of days

that led her from Heaven’s endless sunrise

to this dark night of self-pity.

As she continued to fall for days unended

into an abyss of contemplation,

she wished vehemently

for the sleepy, dim-burning flames of non-memory

embraced by bestial existence

where food & mating & survival were the mere concerns

of unconcerned creatures.

"Who needs the harsh responsibility of love?

Who needs the effort of self-denial our joy demands?

Who needs the humility that beauty commands?

Who needs to imagine an outside world waiting above?"

She screamed.

Meanwhile, a presence she half-felt

hovered beside her on dark wings,

a mocking, new companion who whispered "yes, pretty one"

to every dismal thought.

"The expanse of the ocean does indeed reflect

the distance expanding between joy and reality."

III: A SOFT BLANKET OF FORGETFULNESS

Heat rose in the static air left below

by hope’s flight from despair.

Celeste’s lungs became a billow & a furnace,

inhaling and exhaling fire from and into the combustible air.

"My heart has melted under the infernal flame

received into lungs I call traitorous;

the one who endangers the joyful country of my soul.

My heart lies disfigured and dyingnow

over trembling bowels.

Will not Heaven now reenact mercy and bring back the rain?"

An external voice whispered into her hushed flesh:

See how the wind has stopped

even eternal hope flies in fear from an apathetic soul.

Watch now as before. Without hope: unwhole.

Join your friend in your self-made Inferno.

Celeste felt the burning wax (once her heart)

create a division between her arms & hands

her legs & feet

her soul & flesh.

"All those hours spent in learning to love self

merely meant lost companionship

of friend, of hope, of joy,

and, I fear, soon of soul."

Pride: call it the soul’s deadly sin of gluttony.

Pride became bitterness,

bitterness the self-joy of pride,

but bitterness still devolved into apathy.

And Pride found itself diminished

by the ghost of its damned convert;

a boring mass of static apathy

content to inhabit the furnace of her Inferno,

unable to care for the life fading away.

Fall into the soft blanket of forgetfulness, Celeste

a sleeping beauty fallen from an eternal garden

into an unransomed condition of fading mortality.

"I sleep for one last chance to dream away the cares

that whither the vine of my life ."

And the flesh itself begins to vanish

against the man-made wall,

itself already in a state of erosion:

an inanimate fading of mortality,

lost for the coming age.

IV: even in death the flower...

Three months of winter became three eternal days

while Celeste laid still in a grave of forgetfulness.

Kiln-dried fertile soil became d ust fragments

spread over her lifeless body,

waiting for winter’s white blanket

to turn to sheets of rain.

The turning came, and drop by drop

separated dust particles began to cling to each other,

spec after spec gaining strength from their unity.

From underneath this growing union sprung

a single, delicate arm into renewing nature.

But there is beauty among thorns.

So subtle, yet so wonderful,

That even in the throes of death, a new flower will rise

And bring with it a conquering strength called eternal joy.

Celeste felt the flower pull her from dust to sun.

Her heart, head,& breast, cooled

now by an April Sunday’s life-instilling rain,

began to regain their glorified form.

Yet the earth resisted.

From overhead, the veil called down

Mercy!

Never despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted.

United soul & flesh will recall the pain of separation,

an old rack which, in turn by turn, divides soul & spirit,

who together flee fast from sudden destruction.

Beneath the surface where her still trapped frame struggled

to breach the rain drenched soil,

Celeste felt a welcomed force cling hard now

to her still entrenched frame, sobbing

I will my friend, I will.

Her friend, too, felt the flower’s call to rise.

Yet far from impeding her ascension,

the two found strength in the union.

Once again, arms extended upward,

and the veil, as if obeying an order, descended.

The veil gently covered the two.

Celeste whispered a word of forgotten wisdom,

"the veil is either a covering or a revelation."

Celeste sighed with relief.

The veil arched as a wind- born sail,

pulling her from the renewed soil

and into the hushed evening air:

for the veil had become her wings.