Sestina for Kristina

You were gone by spring; quotidian life returned
with the mockery of birdsong and days of dust.
Those great wars, before our time,
must have anti-climaxed much the same,
leaving charred emptiness and on-going
shadow lands where veterans toyed with normality;

and though my motions pretend normality
as if we never burned, with all returned
to a certain grey continuum, on-going,
in vacant afterlife of hollow dust -
no single hour could ever be the same
since first we fell headlong out of time.

Sitting at work I am elsewhere in time:
in Maida Vale - the street's ostensible normality
of passing cars, buildings much the same,
has subtle shifting dimensions - here I've returned
to chase your phantom face through traffic dust
in manic hope to glimpse your coming or going.

Your omnipresent image was ever on-going
in my racing thoughts. I bided time.
You left and dust settled back to dust.
There was an ache of years in dull normality
until you came again and everything returned
as if from yesterday restored the same.

But since your second coming nothing's the same
and all the old madness remains on-going;
my faith and fitful worship soon returned
in burning days and nights of blurring time;
then falling far away we lost normality
and floated through unreal aeons like motes of dust.

So in the mockery of birdsong I breathe the dust
and wait for who I was to be the same -
wait for recognition, for a semblance of normality.
I never do come back. Life is on-going
but not for me; the me outside of time
with your abandoned you - they never returned.

If something survives our dust to dust returned,
then might we be the same again, escaping time
in blinding abnormality, forever on-going.