Wordless Romanticism

everything just so, curtains closed
candles nipping at even's toes
tablecloth smooth as spilled milk
frozen at it falls -
food cooling on the stove
the wine plays with shadows...
just so, the bare-bones fractured
between dreary and romance
with words, as everything is arranged,
rearranged until worries are furrowed in
until all that is, is undone -
then fuss and muss
'til the moment's gone out of time,
and it's time to love or die trying,
grasping now the mystery
you've somehow always known -
the night now over, over and gone;
food cold, candles fizzled down,
love imperfectly or not at all
and such problems are never solved
in the smoothing of the linen cloth,
the music, the dim, dancing light,
or the vittles cold on the hearth
with no second, no time
or opportunity for words to work
alone, along with the silence,
fingers hover above an empty world
of keys never touched


I can't tell what it is about this one that I don't appreciate. Basically, I was having trouble writing, and, well, I wrote this instead of what I was intending to write. This is what I had been working on :
----

El woke under a tree, golden light sifting between the oaken boughs. Time had passed on, sometime. His clothes were soaked through, though the ground around him was dry enough, and that he'd managed to sleep was as mysterious as his current location.
Rolling hills stretched out at his ankles, gilded in the shafts of dawn light.
   A child said, What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full 
       hands;
   How could I answer the child? ... I do not know what it 
       is anymore than he.

A thin river carved a sinuous line in the valley of two knolls, burning its crystalline path. A brittle bridge arched over the rushing waters, the leaves dripped with the remainder of the night's deluge, the grasses thick with prismatic condensation, the butterfly with wet wings on the stone, not ready, yet, to fly.
    A butterfly with frozen wings, the early bird swooping over me; it's fly or die, and my paper lift flutters ineffectually. Out of time, yet, what have I ever lost by dying?

It was a dream; it must be a dream.
A doe nibbled at the grasses, her fawns lapping at the stream banks, thirsty as the morning trees whispering in the breeze. Wildflowers dotted the hillsides, punctuating every grassland question in colorful reply. The cotton clouds were in whimsy, wandering across the heavens with wonder, with the birds beneath singing, bringing in the spring and fashioning it into beds.
    Every morning / the world / is created. / under the orange / sticks of the sun / the heaped / ashes of the night / turn into leaves again.

El stood, shaking free the swamp attached to his being; as it fell, the droplets stopped and started in staccato, time juddering as a dying machine. The birds, too, stuttered in a broken song, and the doe raised her head in slow segments.
The world is breaking around me, in a whimper.

The bridge - a small dirt path wound around the hills, leading to the rickety bridge. El began walking.
    tread softly because you tread on my dreams

------

this is part of the free-writing I was doing this afternoon that I got stuck on.
(pieces of quotes used from Mary Oliver: Morning Poem, TS Eliot: The Hollow Men, Rumi, Robert Bly: Rumi Translation, Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass, Yeats)