Burn baby burn. Smoldering smoke of those few ashes left where once was a great pillar of towering flame. The Phoenix rises to black sun and butterfly passages.
i find the first part of this a good set up for what is to come later...the contradiction...the cool blue...the juxtaposition of the cool of the evening to the warm hand...but the warm hand that never touches another because the other's hand has been retracted...
i like the italics..it is a poem in itself...
"the water still black"
when you are together with the certain someone, the black is mysterious, inviting..when you can approach it together.
but alone it is scary, terrifying..or just lacks color altogether.
i think "live different lives" isn't necessary...
i feel a point is still made without that line and it is more decoration than necessity..
For me the poem started to really pick up from the middle of the second stanza, because the first fell kind of flat for me. I love the way how you manage to skirt all the images along, effortlessly, (like a sweep of the fingerstips), and how the idyll changes to the gatherings of a storm (waters turn black in the reflection of the sky), and one finds himself back in a (separate) reality. I would suggest reworking the first stanza, otherwise a good read.