Candle in Review

The enchantment of natural light ensnares me on a night soaked in emotion and half-frozen snowflakes.

I see time in the wax: at once sedentary and smooth, now crawling away, coalescing in its clear and present pool. It whispers away, even. How else does the candle shrink into nothingness? In inexorable transmutation the wax is lost, lapped up by the air. Past wax floats away, a phantom of smoke and smells to be caught by lungs, catalogued by brains and maybe preserved therein. Remembered...

There's life, there's existence. Look as it skirts time, flickering in its present pool. There's catalytic contact: a kiss, and time swoons at the flame, melts into its place. Its our greater mover, life, and it burns us, breaks us apart. Collateral collects, detritus in that polluted pool, the present. Bits of us are lost in that collection of time.

We burn out. Whether by force or attrition. Wicks wane by the gobbling flame, and flames flicker and fail. If there's something left when fire swoops up into the air and smokes itself out of existence, if some untouched weight of wax sits still when the light goes out, it remains, forever irrelevant. There it waits, future-time-wax, untapped, untouched. Has it any tie to a wick whittled down, or one dead and doomed to burn no more? Never will it drip and dip into that pool of present life, that once kindled wax, wet with energy, now slipping quickly from memory, solidifying to join untouched time: the solid, the saved, the unexplored possibility of more expansive pools, new formations, realized potential...

Candle, dispel my disquietude. Cradle me in the warmth of your shadow. Smoke, encircle me in your dispersion, memorialize your mother candle as I sleep and she dreams in dying peace.