Everything Was Beautiful

Let me start by saying

my breakdown included swans.

Arched white cobras on a January lake

where I spent a week with Father Knowles,

acting landlord of my anguish 

within the white walls of his rustic cottage

where I wept every afternoon to Mahler

staring out at water refusing to freeze

at the height of my inner spring

as my heart bloomed so violently

it broke the vase of my body,

registering love as a fissure

that then and always after would

equate tenderness with sorrow. 

At seventeen I was both lovesick boy

and ailing white orchid on a sill.

I remember everyday

the ache in my heart felt

like a sore throat in my chest.

So full of gratitude and love was I

that the vessel of my adopted body

sprouted it’s first hairs and became

an unreliable narrator; an acned protagonist 

of a past I would return to again and again

in middle age to mine its quarry

of lost gold and youth and beauty

blighted by my own unworthiness.

That year I swore I’d become a monk

as my heart had been made spiritual

in God’s furnace of emotional agony.

Sadness became my go to emotion

angling to feel loss before loss felt me,

to taste the same grief even when

I had found future happiness.

Was it Mahler who taught me 

that sadness was beauty

and those seven days spent

tracing another boy’s name 

in the white snow

with no way to find my way back

to or from him?

So ill with first love,

and never to be the same again

after challenging the vows

of the pederastic priest;

huckster of empathy 

vs 

a love that would last

as long as I lived.

Peter Valentyne

May 13th, 2019