Psyche and Eros

"I am your darkness — trust me.'
So said her unseen lover, cupping her
like a fruit. In the breathless room, Fear
whispered its tingling fantasies: "He may be
monstrous — or worse, smoothly revolting'. She found
strange growths upon his back, the bed
became lopsided, overburdened,
then it swayed … Sea-sick, love-sick, she turned
the lamp on while he slept and saw, beneath
its gold, a youth whose skin fused peach
with ivory, those wings that must have reached
towards her, unable to bequeath
their mystery. "He is everything I desire,
yet would have kept me here
in blind faith!' Her hands trembled in anger,
spilling oil from the lamp — a hard spiral of fire
into his flesh.
She had no words during the ordeal
that followed: her lover's panic, his spiteful
look when he abandoned her — left as the fool
of other gods with hurtful whims. That oil —
one drop — had burnt a deeper wound
in her: such a long time before she felt whole again.
On Mount Olympus, Eros regained
his strength quite soon, flew questingly abroad.
Yet new stirrings troubled him.
Only years later,
when they were long-married, did she refer
to that lost time: he'd known who she was, or
thought so — had he ever considered her?
He was vague at first, until her finger
pressed that old scar: "Then, you were a mirror
for my power. Now we are dancers circling a fire,
earthed within a space that grows warmer, brighter'.