When the Grail is a Sword: Guinevere's Song

You turned into the mountain
highway, flashed the lights twice,
and were gone.
I unwound my road ahead of me,
away from you,
my way, dark as the minstrel
blood striping my thigh,
unexpectedly enmazing
me again in the cycle of ebb and flow,
I thought had gone, too.

Once, we paused window to window,
your smile in the night
almost enough to warm me home,
your lights again in my rearview sight
closing like eyes in sleep,
my return like the outer curve
of an inner labyrinth,
I hoped would lead me to you once more.

In daylight, I pass the isles of our meetings,
camelots, avalons, circles of stone,
more enduring than our minutes together.
Maybe you were only a coalescing of the mountain
mist, a "tear of the sun"
that looked like you,
who for a moment was dawn flesh,
dew that I laved in,
licked from my forearm,
lapped like any deer or calf
at a saltblock,
milking the time,
constellating a universe
from a second-sighting of you,
where I was seeded, sword cupped
in my craving to be land's end
of your merlin flight,
where I prayed in those talons,
to be held so close that I might
hold new life.
At the very least I'd be
the jess for your eyes
so you might not see
the sun and go again.

MaryAnn Bennett Rosberg