Member Poem

The August sun burned hot the day he was cremated,
the sea-bitten body no longer the man she loved but something
Other, something strange wearing her lover’s best suit,
washed ashore like so much driftwood on the beach at Viareggio.

Though tragic and young, the sea did not forgive him his hubris,
taking the poet into her cool eternal embrace at last breath
and first kisses over graves forgotten by graveshut lips,
lest passion restart the heart in fastlocked chest.

And though the pyre burned hot a strange sight did greet
the lover and friends upon that windswept, foreign beach.
For into the fire a hand was thrust, to grasp desperately
a heart, unburned, as though preserved by fate herself.

Legend goes that the morbid widow did demand the heart
to keep upon her writing-desk, the centre of her world.
Calcified and charred but somehow intact, the heart
did yet beat inside the imagination of the young writer.

All from that fateful year without a summer —
Percy, Byron, Polidori, and Claire’s young daughter —
in two years would be dead, save Mary, who kept the heart
wrapped in silk, proof of the man she did once possess.

If I could but love so eternally, so twisted, and burn so bright
that two hundred years hence poets sing praises to my devotion!

You may rest assured, my love, that if you were to shipwreck,
that I too would keep your heart on ice, in wine, or dried to husk
as a paperweight for my writing corner by the window
to stir my soul to poetry in the heat of an August morning sun.