I know that you are mere flesh and bone,
that scarlet blood streams from your heart
and returns murky, trying to illumine
the billion of your little darknesses,
I know that you wither and fall apart,
the more imperceptibly, the more bitterly,
that your hair keeps exchanging its gold
for plain depreciating nickel.
And yet there is something in me
which recognises your scents and earthiness
as the shadow cast by an imperishable orb,
or as the soil, more fertile through its decay,
in which a deathless luminary buries its root
and feeds itself, becoming brighter as you age.