The Desuetude of the Returned Soul

In the hallowed, sequestered sanctum of the mind,
Where memory weaves its gossamer, golden shroud,
Thou wert an effulgent deity, a celestial kind,
An iconic silhouette amidst a temporal cloud.
Through the long, desultory years of absence and dearth,
The psyche performed an alchemy of sublime ascent,
Transmuting the mere dross of thy mortal worth
Into a luminous myth, a divine sacrament.
I sculpted thy visage in the marble of longing,
An apotheosis of all that was once incandescent,
A phantom melody, eternally, hauntingly thronging
Through the corridors of a heart, once quiescent.
But the nexus of our convergence—this fated hour—
Yields no pyrotechnic epiphany, no cosmic roar;
No sudden flowering of the long-dormant flower,
No tempestuous tide crashing upon a sentient shore.
Instead, there is a palpable, chilling desuetude,
A quiet erosion of the mythic, the grand, the vast;
The collision of the imagined and the mundane, crude,
Where the specter of the past meets the shadow of the present, cast.
The chiaroscuro of thy presence, once so stark and bright,
Is dimmed by the accretion of the quotidian and the frail,
A mere palimpsest of a former, more luminous light,
An evanescent flicker, an exhausted, whispered tale.
We stand as two voyagers upon a barren, stygian plain,
Seeking a resonance that the tides of time have erased;
The lexicon of our intimacy, once a sweet, rhythmic rain,
Has succumbed to an entropic silence, bitter and unplaced.
The semantic lacunae between our spoken breath
Are chasms wider than the void between the stars;
A linguistic atrophy, a slow and creeping death,
Of the shared semiotics that once healed our ancient scars.
For the person who stands before my weary, searching eye
Is a stranger wearing the vestigial mask of a ghost;
The quiddity of thy being has drifted, silent, by,
Lost in the nebulous reaches of a distant, vanished coast.
Is it the cruelty of entropy, this inexorable decay,
That renders the reunion a hollow, sepulchral thing?
That the fervor of the soul is withered away,
Like the desiccated husk of a long-forgotten spring?
We sought the sublimation of our long-suffering grief,
A confluence of spirits in a rapturous, blinding light,
But found only the autumn of a withered, trembling leaf,
And the tepid, lackluster twilight of a waning night.
The grandiosity of expectation, a towering, fragile spire,
Has crumbled into the dust of a prosaic, earthly floor;