Sisters

She appears one afternoon with the musician irrelevant, and all I will ever remember of him will be how his finger strays to his nostril. And his hair, I may remember his dark hair.
Admiring my canvas babies like a Faery godmother bestowing gifts, emerging from her ocean of lace and feathers, entwining me in the boughs of her willow, I surrender in a kind of dreamy fog.
Place...time...weather ceases to matter. All I need exists in her green magic eyes and the subtle accent of her medieval speech. Under her beauty my heart contracts with shame at my own inconsequential self...but then she says, you are beautiful. The angel turns to the thing made of mud and says, you are beautiful.
And the mud thing wakes, suddenly no longer mud...
My mind derides my every craft...until she claims my work as her dream.
Our hands reach, our fingers link.
But never flesh, this love, never heat. More than simple carnal desire. 
Not a thing of my womb or my breasts or my still virgin sex. More than blinding infatuation.
Defined by the most intricate integrated otherness...and by the way the breeze weaves our hair together as we walk.
She, my intoxication.
I, her disciple.
Sisters.
Swallowed whole.
We swim in visions and secret codes...We make chaste love to Fuschia and Ophelia, not touching. This fever dream is fated, but this is our time, our book and we write it with our blood and our deviant innocence.
Her sandalwood rooms raise possibilities that bloom in my unconscious, visions of other places, other ways that might one day be mine...other versions of me...and these, and she, I need to possess. Should I open my body, absorb her by osmosis, she would still be too far from me. 
Queen of her crooked fairytale house, I watch her move with understated grace, like a child starved of beauty watching a swan. Speechless. Over my head and unknowing of how when why I am Timeless with her.
Doing time without her. 
Jealousy and burning when she gives her smiles to others. Cursing her.
Resenting her ingress into my soul even as I worship at her feet.

Cracks. Cracks and words and tumbling doubts and who said you were the boss of me anyway? Souls entwine, one senses a feeding...retracts...aware her existence is at stake. Landslides reveal coarser sides that are unkind. Disillusion in an eggcup and a throwaway theft. They are whispering in the rain, l am doing all the giving, she is doing all the taking, but but but...Eyes open, hurt.
Cracks and words and tumbling doubts and disciples are crying in the shadows. 
Pretty maids are gloating, you will never be one of us, you are not swan kin, servant girl. Lesser creature. And she remains killingly mute.
Phone calls will go unanswered. Letters are easily ignored. I will not be where she is, whenever she is there. My capacity for anger grows like a canker and my poison costs me more than I know.
There is more passion in the leaving than the staying.
Then the leaving is done...

She appears one afternoon with the child unmanageable and husband hustling and a faded wild essence that still calls to me. I watch through the glaze of my newly minted wounds, pretend to laugh at the story of my Judas ring and the brittle drama of my severance from X. I indulge her blank curiosity but reveal only bones. 
There is no poetry in our reunion, just echoes.
A wall of ghosts stands between us. 

But then she kisses me. Lips to lips. For a moment we are spinning through time. Green eyes blue eyes suddenly seeing each other. Fuschia and Ophelia caught under glass, forever.
We go on in tacit agreement of what we are no longer. 
And what we always will be.
Sisters.