Of holding a candle,
Many are the ways,
Yet the flame would
Rather remain untamed.
While a hand may assert
A vain dominion over the
Candle in its grasp and its use,
The flame, always bemused,
Upsets all yokes placed on it:
The haughty hand it erodes away,
The candle it consumes.
Yet, the scars of the hand
Are lost upon the mind:
Waves of golden wax ebb and flow
Over an ocean floor stained grey and white,
Slowly stiffening, slowly congealing…
I lose myself, thinking of this mellifluous fluid.
What of the wick, tucked gently out of sight?
Is it long enough that I will walk happy in the light,
Or am I to be jostled about by darkness? If only.
I checked the wick of this past candle—what should I
Find but that it was not yet consumed, not quite just yet.
But, dear, I had been much too cheap and replaced that
Flame with suffocated embers. Though I
Always presented you with a primordial flame,
I stashed those ashes and stoked those embers,
Inhaling their smoke that you might not complain
Of the fragrance. I should have done much more—
Breathed life onto those embers and made them
Smolder; taken the first among my coronary
Tributaries as the candle’s wick; made wax from
My very flesh and enrich it with the richest lifeblood
From the depths of my marrow.
But, my dear, even then I seem to forget
To replace those embers with a proper flame.
I seem to forget that little is cared
About the wick, or wax, or additive; only the flame
Matters. And that, sadly, is something I cannot give
Of myself nor fabricate.