untitled byler poem - mike pov
inspired by the song of achilles
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i loved him ere i knew that love possessed a name.
in those first green years, when the earth was yet immense and merciful, when dusk gathered blue in the hedgerows and the cicadas kept their brazen liturgy among the trees, i knew only this: that where he went, some secret province of myself was drawn after him. he would turn his head and the afternoon itself seemed to follow. he would laugh, and the air, which moments before had been common, became consecrated.
i was ever a creature of blue things.
twilight roads, basement lampglow, the bruise-soft hour before night, deep water that keeps its vows in silence. even as a child i bore that color without knowing it, some quiet hue of constancy, the shade of distance that remains faithful to shore.
he belonged to gentler golds.
late wheat bending beneath wind, window light on autumn floors, the guarded flame of a candle cupped in two hands. he moved as though some tender radiance had chosen him for its vessel, as though the sun itself, ashamed of its own harshness, had hidden inside a boy to learn softness.
he was not fashioned for the blunt use of mortal hours. there are some beings born with a brightness so grievous that the world mistakes it for delicacy. he moved through our narrow town as though a star had consented, for one brief season, to wear the semblance of a child.
light appeared to remember him. even dust motes, those humble pilgrims of the sunbeam, would rise in attendance where he stood. even shadows gentled their mouths around him.
i, meanwhile, was made of plainer substance. clay and weather, porch light and ash, the sort of soul old poets give no laurels to. yet i tell you there is an ancient nobility in the hand that remains outstretched, in the breast that shelters anotherās winter, in the quiet one who stands beside radiance and asks no witness. if history has little care for such men, then history is poor in judgment.
had there been kingdoms between us, i should have crossed them in sandals blood-wet and smiling. had there been brazen gates, i should have struck them with my bare palms until the hinges wept. had there been a thousand ships required, i would have kindled each mast myself and watched the sea receive the flame. instead there were only culverts, bicycle tracks, wet grass silvered by moonrise, flashlights trembling in our fists, and beneath our streets that abhorrent underworld breathing through its roots. so i crossed those realms instead. again. again. again. gladly.
they say i rescued him, brought him anew, that his power came emerging from the mere memory of me. ah, beloved error. tender falsehood fit for reliquaries and songs. they never understood that whenever i reached into darkness for him, i was only groping after the stolen half of my own spirit, which had gone into exile within his breast years before. when they found him gaunt and shivering, frost in his lashes and terror nested in his bones, it was i who had been returned. what courage seemed in me was merely homesickness.
even after, the world was never finished hurting him. it laid invisible hands upon the back of his neck. it whispered through walls. it used his body as a doorway and named it fate. there were nights he stood beneath skies gone wrong, jaw set, eyes far away, while i could do nothing but remain beside him like the last blue flame in a storm. if i could have entered his suffering and borne it in my own flesh, i would have opened my ribs at once.
there are names the ancients would have pressed upon us with reverent hands. companion of the golden one. keeper of the bright sorrow. the man remembered only in the margin of anotherās splendor. let them write as they please. i have never hungered for bronze renown nor the sterile immortality of marble. let other men be statues. i desired only to be the room wherein he might at last set down his grief. only to be the hands he reached for in nightmares. only to be the first safe thing after years of fear.
his beauty was of that dangerous species which wounds by gentleness, the tremulous glory of candlelight seen through tears. the first pale beam entering a chapel long abandoned. frost gilding a field of graves at dawn. beauty that asks no homage and yet leaves the beholder altered forever, as pilgrims return altered from sanctuaries they scarcely understood. beauty that made monsters covet him and made me worship quietly from three feet away.
many times he looked upon me as starving men look through bakery glass, as votaries gaze upon shut temple doors, as though i were some blessed thing forbidden to his touch. he did not know i had belonged to him since childhood. i longed to seize his wrists and cry: sacred things are touched each day. they are lifted, kissed, broken, eaten, wept over. they are held with mortal hands. i was made, dear heart, to be made common by your tenderness.
i have stood beside him in still rooms and known terrors no battlefield could devise. not fear of claw, nor fang, nor any red catastrophe. not fear of death, which is often simpler than living. my fear was subtler and more savage: that he might pass all his days beneath the very orchard of my devotion and never once taste its fruit. that he might warm himself forever at the blaze of me and call it weather. that he might call me friend with those soft lips while my whole being knelt before him in secret.
if he had bid me come, i would have entered conflagration as a bridegroom enters music. i would have descended through every black aperture of the earth where roots drink secrets. i would have walked the salt floor of the sea, lungs full of prayer. i would have entered that blue-black realm of spores and hunger barefoot as into a chapel, if at the far end he stood waiting with sleep in his lashes and my name upon his mouth. such journeys are easy. it is remaining near him, silent and unconsummated, that has asked the greater valor.
thus i endured the little martyrdoms. the brush of his shoulder, light as snowfall, and the wound it made. the accidental meeting of knees beneath a table, which left me stricken for hours. the manner in which he said my name, plain as bread, and yet i heard cathedral bells within it. the countless evenings wherein twilight lay between us like purple silk, where the sky wore my color and the sun wore his, and neither of us dared tear it.
when he smiled, i understood why cities once consented to burn. when he grieved, i understood why empires fall inward and become dust. when he merely breathed beside me in sleep, lashes resting on bruised cheeks, i knew the whole of creation to be a vessel built for the sole purpose of carrying that sound.
should there come a day, though heaven delays it cruelly, when he turns at last and sets his hand upon my face as one verifying the existence of a miracle, i think the world itself would hush to hear it. wheat would cease its whispering. rivers would suspend their bright speech mid-current. the stars, those old voyeurs, would lean lower in their stations. even the dead beloveds of elder songs would stir beneath their earth and listen.
until then, let men extol their heroes, their iron sons, their splendid butcheries. let them crown the loud and enumerate the slain. i shall remain in the soft illuminated margin, unnamed, ungarlanded, rich only in this inexhaustible poverty: that all greatness granted me was minted in the gold furnace of loving him, and all holiness i shall ever know glows gold against blue.
and when at last they lay my body down, they shall find there was no heart within me, for i placed it years ago in his hands.
it had been beating there ever since.
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