Why are you asking these questions?
John wanted to ask Mary,
but didn’t dare break their whispered conversation.
A part of him was amused by her childish interest in
reviving a dead body.
Who knew what elusive substance the soul
was composed of, that made a man a living creature?
 
He wanted to ask Mary about that
invisible energy emanating from her intense gaze,
that made his foolish heart palpitate for no good, illogical reasons.
What were those almost palpable waves, vibrations all about?
Could electrical current make a heart beat again?
As John nodded his head sagely enough,
a burst of lightning shook the aged house to its core
as if corroborating his statement.
 
“We’re lucky there’s no flooding, or who knows
if we’d survive this strong arrow of electrical strike.”
Though he’d started drowning in Mary’s eyes
long before this whispered conversation had started.
Cupid had showed him no mercy with his
love-dipped fletches. But she refused to see the thunderbolt
as a sign from the universe of jump-starting their future elopement.
 
It was a strange reading choice for such a young
demoiselle. He couldn’t help giving her a quizzical look
as he handed her the book on one of his weirder topics.
Resuscitation. All he knew was that she’d re-awakened something
that he’d thought was long dead and buried within himself.

*     *     *
John wondered why she’d refused to leave
that insensitive jackass Percy, and
take off with him into the wild unknown?
They could try to synchronize the disparate pieces of their hearts
in harmony, and explore the untangling of roots of their past.

*     *     *
Though Mary was tempted, she couldn’t even give a hint to
John about how his own sincere wordless
admiration of her seriousness would lead her to
finally feel the emptiness; her ‘husband’s’ lack
of warmth in the left-hand cavity of his tightly ribbed chest.