I.
Between Trout and Neither avenues,
There is an apartment house overgrown
With vines, and marked for demolition;
Behind that red and crumbled mass
There lies a garden,
Darksome, treeful, behind iron bars.

There they buried him
in that spot he loved best;
Fitting he should take his rest
Where grey sun-shafts drilled the foliage.

Sometimes, under brooding skies,
Better it be when moon and sun converge,
A black-dressed maiden shall arise,
And move about as a mirage;
She calls to her the beasts of dusk,
Cricket, crow and nightingale,
To dance about an unseen bonfire.
Wrapped in smoke from that fey flame,
Into the wet earth they descend,
Dried to dust the way they came.

If you should sit, as Louanne did,
At the attic-window of the house on Trout,
You could hear the voice of guitar and the calls
Of beasts in the night, and a burning scent,
Faintly redolent of wine and bone,
Shall be brought upon the breeze,
But you shall see nothing at all,
And remember
Nothing at all.

II.
The night blackened a thousandfold,
Forested from star to star.
Candles were set upon the garden trees,
Tame and gentle, that formed a shelter
From the smoky world about.

A star she drew in that canopied glade,
In the blood-fed loamy earth,
Ruby-red it glowed, and turned
Slowly as the earth would turn
When viewed from fairy-land.
From the five points of the star,
Sodden bone and transmuted flesh
Gathered to their erstwhile form,
Soft and brown, a dim silhouette.
Turning ever faster, the spoked wheel
Rose triumphant as a flame,
Crimson-limbed as it passed through
And flew beyond its celebrant.

It wrought a sigil in the skies,
Falling up, a falling star,
Evanescent, fading; it was
Only little Louanne,
For whom it seemed a dream-reflection,
Who’d witnessed that soaring shape.
She awoke to the voice of soft guitar,
Echoing through tight-packed earth,
And she was drowning, falling-like,
In Gaia’s rushing vein,
Her extended hand was gripped by
Some woody airy hand,
That pulled the child back to the world,
A blur of moon shadow and flickering,
And a musty thick of fallen leaf–

She awoke again to a strange show,
In firelight, moonlight, insect glow
Were lit the players; the lady and
The lord of that sempiternal dance,
Stepping in an unseen maze,
Ensorcelled by their hallowed trance.

Taking up his instrument,
The leaf-dressed man strummed melodies
Strange to earthen ears, with fingers
Dry, woodlike, on moss-stalk strings.
In a circle, around she went,
Black veils spun like raven wings,
Fivefold, encasing her ballet.
Below her hem, the circle grew
And burned; Louanne climbed forth
To step, her feet’s desire traced that hoop
Even far beyond the ken
Of memory in the minds of mortal men.

He joined the dance at a cadence,
Faster and faster, brighter still
Glowed the steps the players made
To music from that guitar filled
So much with song, it played even
As no hands strummed its seven strings.

III.
A word was spoken, quiet,
And in some foreign, darksome tongue;
Shatt’ring the firmament’s sable matte,
To a blur of wings and flutterings,
Which cleared to deep and farther black,
But oh, how bright the galaxies!
Each star a spinning, burning star,
Drawn upon some stranger earth,
Where a maiden, bard, and child danced,
In their peers’ fair glow.

The final chord, and stars, like magic,
Faded from the ceiling of the world.
She held him in a great embrace,
And soon her lips kissed only air,
She heard from his throat only silence,
Silent, and the ground was bare–
Save for a ring of dry cracked earth,
And deep-red ashes, stelliform,
Scattered o’er an instrument,
That lay in silence and decay.

As the dawn peered ’twixt the signs of
Trout and Neither avenues,
The black-dressed maiden disappeared.
As red broke o’er the line of trees,
That stood bedraggled in the dirt,
And trailed small lines of smoke;

Louanne awoke in her small bed,
Glad to face the day ahead,
And of that far land, fey and dead,
She saw, but dreamscapes, nothing at all.
And remembered, but flames,
Nothing at all.