Divan 21

Tonight I don’t want to be believed.
I want to be humored as you humored me
when you told me you loved me
before you knew you loved me.
I don’t want your light because it could never
illuminate the distances that surround me.
I don’t want anything like your charity;
it would be more than I could bear.

My eyes are useless; I am falling
backward and forward out of their reach
I am like a blind man whose precise hearing
jumps from corner to corner
without the slightest movement of his head.
The perfume the moon has left on your skin
has overwhelmed me and taken my strength.
I am cleansed and my arms are far from me,
so far that I cannot anymore possess
the hands and the fingers that reach down
like roots toward the cool waters of your waist.

Tonight I want our love to be death’s sister.
I want our intimacy to explore
the profound chasms between us.
Tonight I have a terrible need for deserted streets
for departures from train stations covered with snow,
for planets wrapped in perpetual winter,
and for the substance and fire of far-flung stars;
tonight I want the impartiality of deserts of white sand,
the unbearable silence of ice-bound waterfalls,
and the detachment of the eagle that devours
the snake coupled with the indifference
of the snake that captures and swallows the bird.

Tonight, because the day
has shattered my enthusiasms,
I ask for your permission to observe our intimacy
from the whole weight of my solitude.

Tonight, because the evening has left
the innermost core of my being exposed,
I want to lay at your feet the useless weapons
I have used to protect myself,
and offer you the immense spaces
of an under-populated universe.