Read by the author.
I can see your room only with my eyes closed now—
that’s how little I understand anything at all—and you
sitting up as I entered, and in one motion you throwing
off your nightgown, cornflowers and flannel, and the moment
catching your hair’s wildness in an insolent shrug,
and then I was Odysseus naked before Nausicaä—but no
you were naked—I was merely doomed, and I moved
as into the twilight of a cave, like a man loving his own
ruin, happy for his wounds and happy for the wounds
to come. Maybe a spark jumped, but there is no name
for the god of fragments—there was just a fire I believed in.
And there is still a fire that I believe in. Like the nymph,
incandescent in the glade, from whom the man should have
run in terror instead of begging her to renounce her
godliness in the name of carnal love. Still, there were
old men once in their robes and togas who were wise and
famously schooled by a woman, and they told us that
everything here is a shadow of something else—like a song
plucked on strings that implies two bodies dancing in an
ecstasy beyond all earthly knowing. Where is your bed
now? Your prodigal body that whole polities might worship?
In what world? That is what I am asking, love. What world?
