after Robert Schumann (Geistervariationen)

I.
You lept from the ocean and became two.
A gentle glitch, you wisped into dual haunts. 
Your Eastern breath varnished the abyss—

you filled its azure crests, threaded lines of pearl 
through the blueblack sheen—cherubic circuits 
across the fuzzy void, my half-rendered sight.

II.
One half of you hovered around me, whispered 
of the wingblades of the bloodred whirlwind, 
of that Black September, of your mouth

that scarfed up dead grass and tile shards— 
and spit back dovesong, gunsmoke, poems, 
and the wafting apricot perfume of your jailers.

III.
The other half of you possessed me, held 
me in your vapor arms, and I shivered, 
prayed you would remain with me until the end

of the phantom war—until the void of ocean tapers 
into warm glass and froths white like a dovewing— 
so I may never be alone, half-rendered, again.