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Visions behind closed eyes.

The tea Deenyet had given me held cradled in my hands without taking a sip of the soothing herbs. I sat looking at the murial I'd begun on the canvas inside my wagon. Something other than the children, no other had seen. It had been a vision that I could not shake since its beginning .. a want, a need .. a desire to see stretched before me. It had started on my world and still haunted me even now.

The colors on the canvas faded to another moment ... the vision of a woman close to the fires and a warrior leaning down from his saddle with his hand extended. Was it not the mirror image of another night? I hear his words like an echo, the sound of a singers voice, velvet in its touch to the ears ... Come.

I close my eyes and feel my hand slide into his and know the lift into the saddle with him. I know the feel of my shoulder resting against his chest, my head in the hollow of his throat. I can hear the symphony of his heartbeats as well as the inhale that rends his senses with the scent of me. The lope of the beast beneath us that buffets our closeness to and fro until he draws me tight, firmly so their is no barrier between us except the leather that clings with heated mist of two bodies.

The destination had been mapped for my eyes before, written on flesh and signed .. the message had been clear and understood. It had not been the first time that I'd walked away though with urging time and time again had been sent back to speak with him. The line of the hill marked at its highest point beneath the lowest star .. that place where the sky and the land meet. The vision of him standing beneath the moonslights, lit by their glow .. magnificent.

I would hear the haunting melody and feel the meaning .. of all the beautiful things thought of, of what is felt within .. the depths of it all until the tears dammed behind my closed eyes. To loosen them would not be to let them fall but to be lifted to the sky so that they cascade over the plains like rain .. falling fast, falling hard to seep along the dry ground to seek the source. Perhaps there, they would be lifted once more as a sip to quench a thirst.

It is now I open my eyes and I still see the outstretch of a hand .. the image that I had dreamed of seeing on more occasions than at the stream. I see different one paused there and I look to the woman, a woman that had watched me ride away with him once before and I watch her turn and walk away.

My hand had not risen to meet his but now as the bowl fell to the flooring my fingers lifted to touch the canvas.

One day there will be the clasp of wrist to wrist in a grasp that is meant to be and I won't turn loose.