All His Sins Remembered

All His Sins Remembered

 Unheeded.
 Untouched.
 Unloved.

 This soul that waits like cold smoke over dark and silent waters.  He had spent a lifetime denying my presence.  He had mortared and bricked me from the sun and moon, from the wind and rain.  But still I lived in the silence between his heartbeats, in the suffocating confines of his conscience.

 This night, I stand trembling as a lover come to quench a lusting thirst, filling as though stars were rising in my eyes.  The cemetery, holding fast the darkness between pale stones, becomes a mute witness to my unfolding.  Here in this necropolis, my memories come in gatherings like dried leaves, scurrying and scratching in cool moonlit breaths and then are no more.  I kneel before his grave and knead fingers through fresh soil, inhaling the intoxication of time and night whose mating had produced such a rapacious daughter to lay within—all his sins remembered.

 I gaze at the words chiseled upon the marble headstone.  I had but murdered a killing stranger with a familiar name and visage.  Nothing more.

 I watch the moon slipping gracefully through reaching fingers—save those of mine own.  I whisper my farewell.  The past is dead and as true as the rock-filled coffin beneath me.  I am dead, never to return.  I am reborn, to begin again.

 I walk through the cemetery gates and into an unfathomable night, till at last I stand naked and raw and beautiful.  My eyes filling with stars.