Dust Motes
by Richard Tillinghast

Assumption
by Molly Giles

Hard to Believe
by Charlie Geer

Dust Motes
    Richard Tillinghast

The light turned tawny then golden,
from lion’s mane to gold-letter illumination,
as we passed our afternoon in bed.
A flotilla of dust motes drifted
unanchored on the tide of
sunlight streaming through our sunset window.
The old word courtship suited us, and the days we courted
were becoming as legendary to us
as stories of the Grail were
to chroniclers and scribes
and to pilgrims who read their lines in Latin
by the light of a tallow candle
guttering on a limestone ledge.
Those chronicles
glanced back and forth from your eyes to mine
and took us back to our first afternoon,
when we walked uphill through an avenue of hazels,
a little out of breath and unsure.
Our hands hadn’t found each other yet,
but our thoughts had.
Months later, as we sheltered in the ruin
of a roofless old church,
we found the stone coat of arms whose motto
we took as our own:
Nil difficile amanti.
A lion propped it up with stone paws,
and rain made those letters glisten.
Let there be a monk, a kindly man of our imagining.
Seat him in a scriptorium love fashions stone by stone.
Build him a writing table and
kindle a fire to keep his fingers warm
as he dips his brush
cut from a unicorn’s mane
into pots of Byzantine purple and gold
brought back by Crusaders.
Let him write in ink of narwhal tusk
ground and mixed with rainwater
our legend
so you can read it to me
as we lie in bed this afternoon.