with respect to the years
"To depart!
I'll never return,
I'll never return because there is no return.
The place one returns to is always different,
The station one returns to is never the same.
The people are different, the light is different, the philosophy is different."
-- Fernando Pessoa as Alvaro de Campos, "La-Bas, Je Ne Sais Ou
"
gauze to the wound:
blood blossoms.
i watch it start as a pinprick, as a seed.
it vines, entangles you.
your left hand shakes.
"i'm sorry!" you want me to say.
i will not.
you sputter something.
i see that blood root you to the spot;
what new thing there is growing?
you try to say,
"but why now? why wait so long to tell me?"
and i imagine the sleepless nights,
the image of her face overlaid yours,
the unconscious pleasure-sound of her name straining to break the shores of my lips,
plunged down by the current.
why now?
i asked myself the same thing not ten minutes ago,
and did not wait to answer before acting.
i never had the answer before the act:
why not now?
in a week i'll call,
you'll answer and not say a word.
i'll tell you,
you can have everything.
but here:
i watch your breath declined,
the space within your eyes take flight,
that burning valediction of the mind.
ecstatic dereliction!
this leaving, this conviction!
and yet:
i know, in the dark course of my own roots,
though they hide --
i will not find
her face as it is now, in the aether of imagination.
it won't be the same as it used to be.
because she is not the same as she used to be;
you have changed,
i want to tell you,
you do not recognize yourself.
i recall your face as it was then,
in memory, in dreams,
and i place it over you now with your chin between my fingers and your tears on my palms.
it will not align.
i have to leave,
because it was my leave of leaving
that brought you here, to night.
we are alight,
in the wisps of moonbeams laid too tight.
