AURORE

There’s a most gentle poem, saved for the future to write.

By then, you’ll no longer belong to me, and I only to the breeze.

Then we’ll share, like wedges of a tangerine,

what each hated in the other. Or we’ll vie

to forget, like rain leaping through the waterfall.

Those moments I watched you smile

have met their autumn, dying off one by one.

One by one, we leave the selves we were,

as if coming to the cruelest edge of life,

then casually stepping over.

Cruel silence suddenly enters the conversation,

your profile cruel, pressing close, that curve I learned well,

for which I too am cruel.

Your fingers, my lips, the freedom and unfreedom they touched,

all cruel. The bodies in which snow falls and melts,

the lives embracing emptiness, the dark

collapsing and resurging like a dune, the sweet circling songs,

cruel. Extinguishment is cruel, what’s said, unsaid,

unwritten words, the wait unawaited, all cruel.

There’s a most gentle poem, composed only for venomous cruelty,

engraving for time its unseen pattern.

In your steps and mine dancing off, love is a blind man amid stars,

in boundless brightness, clasping his own dark candle.