Sestina for Six Sober

Serendipity, a winning ticket in the gutter of bewildering shift,
astonishing to gooseflesh. Still it was November when you held
shaking close, despite foetal hands of hangover clinging to my hair:
smoke drifts, hoover-bag coughs, parfum de pub - you were there
(sand through hour glass hand). The last mulish bastion from utter surrender,
renders the painful start of slow steady progress not perfection.

Thus God arrived unheralded, infusing with a delicate perfection
through the tiny wooden runners of closed door to steal, to shift
into a clam shell ventricle, to steer hermetic heart deftly to surrender.
Unto the quiet meeting fall the little broken ones, together gently held
not quite in this world and time. In a place of in-between, we're safe there
like lost babies comforted, leaning into love that smoothes and strokes hair.

Alas, no cataclysms of conversion! Requiring just the breadth of half a hair
to lay the first tentative part of the way to a post-earth dreamed perfection.
Anguish diffuses sending showers past a short time; it seems nothing is there.
Yet a slow gestation stretches blindly in the dark towards an unknowing shift
en route to a new life where freshly sober shiver in a confused huddle. Held
tightly by those who are with me, in final place my brethren by surrender.

Somewhere in the third month you assured me that my own hesitant surrender
was complete. Thank God! The thought of battling again made the hair
on my neck stand to attention, saluting alcohol ( its rank to be held
and respected). An olive trembles in a frosted martini glass of liquid perfection
and I know it is all over (the olive sinks). Swallowing dry and thirsty but a shift
from compulsion and need means I walk away easy. At last relief is there

in the bar room and the house of Usher stops falling because I'm not there
to wreck and cut not knowing hurt was always this side of surrender.
Would the tincture of my stubborn gasps, the gash in ground before the shift
in future fields reveal red earth the old grasses scattered like blown hair
across land that slopes softly to sea? Wreckage cleared for a harvest of perfection.
Something may come from the raped soil so long as our belief is held.

Belief, I must live for the things I strain for with a saline heart, yearning to be held
against you when all these things I've bled and written of are no longer there
in the hazy half-heated summer where the lazy whirring of insects feign perfection.
Our desperate world ends and yet begins in a single sober beat and we surrender
for the last time. I will find you, tears will be wiped from feet with tresses of hair.
Flesh so willing eases tendrils, into the quiet shadow sounds a Doppler shift.

Progress in small steps not perfection is the way our journey must be held
towards an acceptance, a shift to all that's uncovered when we're finally there;
Paradox strength, ultimate surrender, burying sad eyes in your perfumed hair.