Love, a river and the mantle

A little distance
 and the dittany of discomfort
 wash over the wounds of love;
 mere debris riding on
 a rolling wave of
 unknowns.

Unknowns,
 that are curiously
 more familiar
 than the now-tart love.
 They flow like true water.
 A river with origins
 back in time,
 collects and erodes
 deposits and embanks
 and no dam,
 no matter how deep
 can hold its own.

Own
 are the memories
 that muddle into clay
 and harden into boulders.
 Soon there will be jagged terrain
 where once
 was a sandy beach.
 Look carefully enough
 and the boulders are
 interlaced.

Interlaced like love once was.
 But,
 torn apart at the seams
 It now rests.
 Satiate.
 Echoes stitch all torn seams
 together into a quilt.
 He wears it as a mantle.

The mantle
 that is a swathe.
 The swathe
 that was sand.
 The sand that was
 left behind
 by the ever-onward river.

A river
 is abandoned
 for that which it left behind.
 

There is no unknown,
 but for the one
 that hides in plain sight.

The passage of time can be a complex reality and a rather unwelcome change when it comes to dealing with things that we have to leave behind. And of those things, the one that doesn't seem to leave us behind in the shadows it casts on us is love. More than love, the memories of love. More than memories, the hazy emotions. More than the emotions, the haze they seem to be engulfed in. It is this haze, that we cannot decipher and, consequently, are most drawn towards.

This creates pockets of lost time, or what you also know as reminisces/memory. A memory is nothing but living in an already-lived moment in time. But all that's almost boilerplate, isn't it? What makes it intriguing is the choice! What we choose to carry will become a part of us. It may be the part that we crave or the part we only-too-generously give. Or, maybe, you choose none—no carrying, no stuff, no haze. Does that make you a river? Or the mantle? Is there even a choice in the world of love, a river and the mantle.

This is one of the very few poems that I have rewritten to make it more abstract (it generally goes the other way around!). With both the poetry and the description being abstract, it aims to mimic the "haze" in a manner that then holds a mirror to the choice the reader is forced to make in unbundling the poetry itself.

Here's to an eventually (hopefully) slightly less hazy Sunday. Happy Sunday!