Mind blank, with the sky blue clarity
of an old zodiac aglow: empty vault,
blue and compact, pellucid form
sheltered in form. Thus I find myself,
on the prowl for a street. It isn’t here, it never was:
it exists in levitation, now,
for the mind devises it. Surly siege,
plaint of visible and invisible: flame
and consummation. Contours, immobile
crystallising stone. Tonight,
a storm of eyes, a storm a word designates
without saying it entirely, like the reflection
of a pearl in shadows. Now the fingers
burn with the clarity of a word. The sun?
The nocturnal solar body, in shards, tumbles
downsky, downskin. Not even tactility
can arrest its fall. Blazing
and puissant. By morning, they water
the streets, and a silence bare of claxons
in the damp passages discloses an empire
where skin answers skin, where the knot
ties and unties itself. Orion’s torches
look on the interlaced bodies. Astral
stage of curtained depths
over sonorous splendor. You utter
one word, the word of touch, the sun
my hands grasp, the sun made body,
the tactile quality of the word. And tactile, inviolate,
the stars, carriage skidding
into the depths of grey glass and reflected
in your luxury, glow of buttocks and back,
the fixed, igneous orb: the verso
lays bare the dark thunder of the mons veneris.
Two shadows shine when the firmament
shifts the galleys and oars, and now I hear
the lap of waves, the splash of breasts and stomach
copied by the night. The cosmic room
is the room of the body, nor does white
mingle high clouds with the green of foam:
it delegates everything, it conveys everything. They quake,
in hopes of receiving a name, the creations
of the darkness, the portrait of the two bodies’
pincers, the sky’s blanket, rotating
horoscope. Meaning? Everything is doubled now:
words and beings and darkness.
But listen: further off, from corners
and lampposts of night, unmurmuring,
unknown negative of magnesium,
I come, my face comes, and that face
becomes my face again, as if they stamped out
my eyes, my lips, with a dye, everything,
in the toilsome reunion with this other – a trace
made with charcoal – whom I don’t know, who
seizes the ice, who melts and freezes me.
This is the adversary, the thing I feel,
derisory and sovereign, eye or scorpion,
the name of the animal, the erstwhile domain.
Does love call for it? When tooth and nail
prowl the skin’s blue perimeter,
when the appendages clench, does certainty
emerge from a remoter depth? Bent, the lovers
plunge, like mineral forms
thrown off by the night that the world burns to ash.