If You Were Coming in the Fall

I watched him as he worked on the woman, tending the burns on her arms and legs, skillful as a surgeon, fingers just as deft. I sat quietly, gazing at him over the top of the book I held in my lap, but his eyes never met mine. For three days, never a look, never a smile, never a touch. I had kissed him so many times under the infinite sky. How could I not love him, his liquid golden eyes, the scent of his fur, the memory of his claw tips and teeth against my skin, his gentled and scarred heart?

Yet I felt I’d lost him. The woman left and we were alone in the Library; still, he was not with me. Pretending great absorption in a drawing that had been left of the chess table, he studied it as though it were a map to the greatest of hidden treasures. I thought over the past few days. He hadn’t said a word to me other than a neutral greeting since the night he bounded away from me through the debris-laden floodwater and into the street. The night that I sought aid from Lorne.

Every time I approached him, trying to lay a gentle hand on his arm or back, begging for a moment to ask him what was wrong, he simply turned away. He wasn’t angry, abrupt or rude. Somehow, it would have been easier if he had been. I could not choke off the feeling that something had changed between us, that I no longer mattered. His anger would have been easier to bear; at least in anger there is passion. But this nothingness…it was untenable. Love is so short...and the emptiness so long. He had promised to walk the path with me, to lay with me even in a field of stone. But I fear I now walk alone on a rocky, narrow way, with cut and bloodied feet and my mouth full of ashes.

If you were coming in the fall,
I'd brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.

If only centuries delayed,
I'd count them on my hand,
Subtracting till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemens land.

If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I'd toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity.

But now, all ignorant of the length
Of time's uncertain wing,
It goads me, like the goblin bee,
That will not state its sting.


E. Dickinson