I think about him still. The lone boy  
standing at an edge of the obelisk  
at the crack of dawn playing a tune  
I’d never heard, warm brass with cinnamon tendrils,  
then sudden sweetness—a furtive gecko painting its tail  
across the unfolding. You are right to ask  
what a seventeen-year-old girl was doing there.  
I was a runaway. It’s no tragedy. I had meant  
for an epic rebellion, but was gently held,  
my days thrilled from end to end. A bygone era.  
I couldn’t tell you what I was doing. I only know  
that I stood three meters from this boy, his skin a hue  
even deeper than mine in that city hell-bent  
on drowning us under its weight.  
 Gray and blue and purple wafting behind him  
more ancient than any ruin, even as they slide  
into light. He grew me into something else, this boy. 
Something no longer a child. Stale smoke  
on the morning air, a tang of espresso beans.  
 Head upturned, eyes closed, casual  
as the first raindrop, he slid a nocturne  
in C sharp minor between loneliness  
and solitude like tucking a hand under  
a shoulder blade. Perhaps this, my skin engulfed  
in morning dew and music,  
is the true human romance.  
Immune to purpose. Just a hinge  
between day and night,  
the right to be a body in its body.

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.

High in the secret places of the hills
Cliff-girt it stands, in grassy solitude,
No ruin but a vision unachieved.

This temple is a house not made with hands
But born of man’s incorrigible need
For permanence and beauty in the scud
And wreckage of mortality—as though
Great thoughts, communing in the noise of towns
With inward isolation and deep peace,
And dreams gold-paven for celestial feet,
Had wrought the sudden wonder; and behold,
The sky, the hills, the awful colonnade,
And, night-long woven through the fane’s august
Intercolumniations, all the stars
Processionally wheeling—

                                                Then it was
That, having reared their wonder, it would seem
The makers feared their God might prove less great
Than man’s heart dreaming on him—and so left
The shafts unroofed, untenanted the shrine.