"When it first began"

When it first began, I do not quite remember
It may have been late one night last September
When first I saw her there in a lucent dress
With eyes bright like the moon and lustrous tress

It was slow at first, I think, like a calm forest stream
But when I finally noticed, I was too far within the dream
My mind, once so structured, ruptured in the rapture
I fell into her, fell into fathomless feelings and her capture

And when came night, each midnight, the dream took hold
As if my body fell into ice and was shackled by the cold
But a cold that was met with an equally fierce flame
Rippling through all my senses, a passion so untamed

Where this would take me I could hardly have known
Unknown like the secrets in her dusky eyes in which I was drowned
What she taught me, of myself and of love for another
Were something I had never felt before, and never by another

She was enervating and invigorating, this conqueress
And if I could have stopped it I would not have, I must confess
The constant disassembly and reconstruction in me was a thrill
A passion-fever, a near-addiction that I could just not kill

She, this beautiful thing, stepped out bare from some fantasy
A fantasy that I indulged in and voyaged blindly on its sea
With but a toss of her hair or an utterance of her voice
I was run through and torn apart, all allowed and by my choice

The bloodless savagery, the calming force—this was her way
A weighty, crushing silken caress, I remember it still, to this day
The dream left me changed, left me a little less whole as a man
But how I wish I was there again, there, when it first began

M.M. — 26-Apr-2015