After so many nights of insomnia and rats
waking her mid-dream, in the midst
of the darkness, beside her. After all those
nerves jangling along her skin due to urinary
infections, and periods coming late,
he has reserved for himself the task of topographer
and chronicler of this new world that is his.
He remembers the night they met:
the music, the lights and the words
of that long and interminable conversation
that they resumed once more last night.
Since then he has done nothing but live
these moments and extract from them an image
of which he is photographer and participant,
in order to show it to those he knows,
as you always do after the holidays.
But there is a lost world that remains far off,
where she has lived for years and years,
which has made her what she is, and where he has no
residential permit, and has been unable
to smash through the walls or cross the ditch.
He guesses at its roofs and gardens,
and the animals that are there from the cries
the wild beasts make, and he listens to them carefully:
he imagines architecture and geography,
but he is a poor cartographer of the past.
He has explored the seven seas of her eyes
but he will never know the expression she wore,
the empress of the forbidden city.