Status Updates From Memory in My Hands: The Lov...

The weight of a stone between the hands
tastes of time.
In a stone lies
the patience of the world, slowly ripened.
The incalculable sum
of days and nights, sun and water
which it took to form this hard and awkward shape
that can’t caress and keeps us company
with only its weight, darkly.

Tell me, do you remember the dreams,
when they were there,
before us?

Thinking about you tonight
wasn’t thinking of you with my thought,
just me, from myself. The wide world
was thinking of you with me, thoroughly.

The great dream of the field, of the stars,
with the sea silent, the grasses invisible,
dry perfumes their only presence,
all of it,
from Aldebaran to the crickets, thinking of you.

And separation isn’t the moment
when arms, or voices,
say goodbye with material signs.
It’s before, it’s after.
If hands are clasped, if you embrace,
it’s never to move apart,
it’s because the heart feels blindly
that the only possible way of being together
is a long, clear farewell.
And that the goodbye is the surest thing.

My questions sinking
with the light into nothingness,
silent,
so that you will answer
with equivocal stars;
and then, newborn
with the dawn, startling
in its newness, apprehensive
of asking the same things
I was asking yesterday,
which the night answered
only halfway, starburst.
Between years and life,
what an anguished dialogue!

The verbs, indecisive,
would look into your eyes,
trembling like faithful dogs.
Your command
would mark
their directions, their actions.

And still I wait for your voice:
coming down from telescopes,
from the star,
through mirrors, through tunnels,
through leap years
it could come. From anywhere.
From a marvel, absolutely.
Because if you should call me
—if you called me, if only you would call me!—
it would be from a miracle,
unrecognized, unseen.

Let the fires go out,
let the lips all stop,
let voices never
again say, "I love you"! Let
a great silence reign,
a round quietness,
to avoid the disaster
which lips seeking each other
would bring to this sum
of successes which is the earth!

the final destiny
of man : his skeleton.
Love, love, love.
Because who has ever known
if it creates or consumes?
And whether when it burns us
it's exalting us to flake,
or willing us to be ashes?
That's why the world, feeble today,
fears it more than anyone.
And we have to put the notice out
to all lovers
that life is
at the brink of rupturing
if they keep on kissing
the way they kissed before.

...that lightning bolt of "you" and of "I",
of "You love me" and "I love you"
can never penetrate,
all the pain of the first and second person, which separates
two people forever
in grammars and in the world.

The dead who never kissed
don't know the razor's edge
of separation.
Separating is
two mouths that move apart
against their destiny
of kissing forever.

P.193 (A Reason For Love)

I rock myself in the weariness
and in it you hold me and I hold you,
even if you aren't there.
And if the flame should go out
of the clumsy spirit where it still lives the past
in the light of memory
the faithful body remembers,
it holds a vigil not to forget, and it's that palpable
fatigue which saves
what the exhausted spirit abandons.

They’ll sleep at last in our enfolded dream,
themselves embraced. So that later,
when we separate, when distant shadows are
our only nourishment, they
will have memories, they will have a past
of flesh and blood,
the time they lived in us.
And their arduous dream
of shadows, once again, will be the return
to this pink and mortal matter
where love invents its infinity.

Days and kisses
walk around bewildered:
they don't end up where they promised to.
But to love
you have to embark on all
the projects that go by,
without asking them a thing,
full, full of faith
in the error
that yesterday, today, tomorrow, cannot feel to come.