YOU LOVE ME, BUT NOT THE WAY YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO

You love me, but not the way you’re supposed to.

First, you’re staring at me with blue instead of brown eyes
Yet, brown is required by the exam of our love.

Secondly, your touch resembles the leaf wandering through the ether
Attracted by the moon’s miracle,
While I long for the touch of unsmooth skin
Like the animal that’s seeking water through valleys
In the dry season.

Thirdly, your hair is shot through with dark colors
Like the mist in a beech wood at evening time
Nevertheless, for the experiment we’re conducting
Red hair’s required, like the onion tea
Chasing away the cold, back in our childhood.

Further, even further, your breasts
Don’t carry the aroma of ripe peach, but of the apple
Dipped into caramel
Which you know, you know how sweet and scented and liquorish to the taste is,
How unbecoming.

You must also know that your mouth is not filled with the cold, metallic saliva
Of the women working the fields,
On the contrary, it bears a warm, vague juice, slightly salted, slightly tonic
That reminds me of the summer days on the Black River, the days
When one stares at the water running dry under his feet, carried
By the irremediable circuit of the liquids in nature
Into the armpits of nymphs enchanted by indifferent gods,
Into the tears of schoolgirls ready to fill all their notebooks with quotes from Rilke.

I stare, unsated, at a delicately drawn nose, straight and fresh like a wheat field
Upon which the sun has sown the grains into freckles
Yet, for the optimal flourishing of our love,
I need an imperfect nose, not too straight, not too curved,
Eventually sloping towards the north
Sniffing the ebb tides in the sunset hour.

And the shoulders, your shoulders firm and tan
I need them to scatter their beach-gathered bronze, I need them
To borrow something from the white of the alcove,
From the grey of the library,
And then, even so imperfect, even so elementary doomed
Our love will have started gaining a form
And I will call you by a made-up name that shouldn’t seem peculiar
As you shall find a suitable name for me.

Only then shall we set together, without, naturally, ever reaching it,
To Ithaca.

THIS COULD HURT

“This could hurt,” the doctor on duty tells me
While he sticks in my arm the thick, silvery needle of an IV,
Adjusting the flow of the liquid in slow, drop-by-drop motion,
So I won’t get cold and afraid.

Except I was already cold and afraid,
And about to find out that the things coming up next, unequivocal, undelayed
Could hurt.

The words hurt me before the flesh felt anything.

I was going to discover, sooner or later,
That separation hurt the same.
That lost competitions would hurt not only for a bit,
That the quarter of an hour by which the ideal, unique woman
Merely noticeable until not long ago, fundamental since she’s extended you her hand,
Is taking her time
Would hurt just the same.

And the setting of the sun atop an unwarmed heart
Could hurt enough.

What’ll hurt, indisputably, are the characters in the volume
Which unfolds under your eyes the fatality of life,
Something that you, pale reader with pale soul and body, have already grasped
Through your old thirst for words, all dried out and shivering now.
The end of the second grade hurting, the edge of the forest
With fir, calm trees, with branches soaking in snow, hurting,
The complimentary smiles, all hurting even more!

The lacking answer to one simple mythological question, hurting,
The understanding that you know now less than before, hurting,
The forgetting and the dismissal, with a grim, of the forgetting, hurting,
The first poem you wrote, lost for years, now found,
Hurting immensely.

It appears someone’s phone hanging up on you could also hurt,
As well as the physical impossibility of showing your son how to climb the tree of dreams
Or any tree that will just surface, defiant, before you.
It should hurt the contemplation of a painting in Louvre, alone,
And, no less, the grounds of an unrepeatable coffee.

Sometimes, sometimes even the beauty reflected by the mirror could hurt,
Or the waves tearing apart against the harbor, when you’re twenty
And hold someone’s hand very tightly.
These could all hurt, except you know now that there is a time
In which hurt can be overlooked
And another time
In which joy brings along an insufferable pain.

The sign that this poem will have been perfectly understood
Is that it won’t be read with satisfaction
And it will never be re-read again.

For even as it comes out now, inoffensive, shy, lacking visceral virtues of verse,
It could still hurt.

IT’S LIKELY THAT I DON’T LOVE YOU

It’s likely that I don’t love you,
Yet I planted a flower on your behalf at the edge of the park,
I watered it constantly and sometimes, upon nightfall, I kissed
Its petals.

It’s likely that I don’t love you,
Yet I painted your reflection on every paper piece I since came across,
During meetings, at dinner places, in classes and at the Sunday reunions
With simple people, good and autonomous friends
Who know nothing about love
And I might just have been one of theirs, all along.

It’s likely that I don’t love you,
Yet every time someone spoke your name
I swallowed my silence and I frowned
And afterwards, for minutes, I couldn’t focus on other words,
Other names, along with the sentences built around them.

It’s likely that I don’t love you,
Yet that evening, the evening you’ve allowed me a feeble kiss
After which you’ve withdrawn in your own star cluster, in your zodiac of solitude
I wandered the streets for hours without noticing the cold,
And I’ve caught it. A suspicious cold, inadequate to men who are strong.

It’s likely that I don’t love you,
Yet here, right now, when I write about you and I gather it is so plain:
You’re not part of my daily unfolding the way I would have wanted to,
You’ve got a life apart of it all, living you past and future in a wrap, all-in-one,
You’ll persist in making your own a remote or non-existent determinism
Which only you can see, like an object behind a piece of glass,
That you’re devoting your time to people who don’t resemble me at all,
Who might very well be extraterrestrial beings;
Even now, when I put down our interrupted story
I button my lips and imagine what could have been
And that way of thinking is inadmissible, even for a philosopher.

It’s likely that I don’t love you, very likely, I’m almost sure of it…
Yet, how bright the light is which flows down from your memory
Shrouding together, intolerably, this chaos of emotions and cynical reflection that I’m made of!

MICHELLE

At her window, translucent angels gather in a heap
She gave everything up and laid down to sleep.

Destiny is a grey-colored creed
She wanted to be married sometime and have kids,

She needed to find the fundament of the sky in every dew sample
And for someone to kiss her feet and her temple

Make her a whole.
But they’ve found her on the side of the street, livid and cold

On the sidewalk where the children had played hopscotch many a time
Even the footsteps had their own glossy, jagged rhyme.

I haven’t loved her at all, she was wearing her unattractiveness like a disguise
But she had her own beauty when in awe or when tears filled her eyes

That made me want to bring her more pain, to set her eyes ablaze,
Have bluish tears sparkling in her gaze.

God had given her the gift of daydreaming without end
The hardest gift to bear, the gift of the condemned.

She used to tell us that the world is superficial, that we’re forever wrong
That there’s no room in our senses for love, light or song

As she used to read Plato with her mind.
She didn’t love gods or heroes, just saints, like the kind

That she’d saved herself for, bitter until the fall
We were only her objects, like she’d imagined us all

Therefore, after she left, we got reborn as humans, our faces once more erased,
Hidden in temples we’ve built to replace the perennial maze

Upset that she’s given it all up. Forgot about us and went to sleep
Missing just how, at the edge of our world, translucent angels gather in a heap.

DAYTIME ELEGY

Let’s not allow the moon to bring its shade
And park it in your hair for a while
The angels resting on your shoulder blade
We should send off, adrift another mile.
Need to postpone the stars that plan each night
To sparkle ’round your eyebrows and your ears
And put the constellations down fortright
So they would stop reflecting in your tears;
For all you need is dawn and day, wide spacing,
To lay upon the fields in restless brew
And whisper to the unborn grass that’s breaking
Throughout the clay, that she’ll be safe with you,
That all the daily rhythm and turmoil
Will be at peace from now and sing in tunes
Once you’ve walked out of sundown, mist, and oil.

Eternal goddess of my afternoons.