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.