Voici des fruits, des fleurs,
des feuilles et des branches
Et puis voici mon coeur qui ne bat que pour vous.
Memory ravishes
Certain nights when the blossoming trees
Breathe against my shutters.
In an earlier night forgotten by all
mythmaking
Tales of love and betrayal, you and I
Wandered, the dark rites in completion,
Through hidden paths in the indigo.
Aimless we roamed, seraphs condemned
To the inspiration between death and death,
Bayou night throbbing in life and heat,
Godless Eden where man has his place
Even as the quicksilver deer in the shadows
Whom we hardly startle. Together and alone;
I fallen as always, and you
Sorrowing in the only movement of prayer you knew.
Something I had said earlier had made you laugh -
I forget what – and now this silence was my punishment.
(Keen and fragile the veil of loneliness, dearest,
Impenetrable as marble even crumbling.)
Savagery crowds on your innocent fields
at night,
Your cotton and your indigo, the swampland reclaiming
In reptilian patience her body ravished by man.
Wild gnarled oaks hung with moss, cypresses, magnolia
Draped with perfume and strange fleshy lianas,
The sensuous cedar, black willow and green,
Mimosa making free with gold long-hoarded,
And tulip trees that cup dew for our brother moth.
The call of a bird – nameless even to these untamed lands,
And on the very edge of the plow's furrow,
Wild cherry flaming like a pale beacon in the obscurity.
Perhaps I wish you to know, dearest,
That I was watching; that I saw
Your quick intake of breath, and the lift of your arm
Graceful as a dancer's protesting
The presence of such purity in the world.
You reached out with sight still breathtaking new
And a tenderness not for me,
To brush your white hand against the white blossom.
Perhaps – what use now? – your oblivion
Was a small cruelty, easily remembered,
And far too difficult to voice.
For the flowering tree was a sharp sweet pain,
A fragrance all one with the dark bark
And the ghostly exquisite petals,
Like a dream out of the elder-days of myth
When sight and sound and scent were one -
The flower-taste of you in my throat
And in my loins, the dazzling purity
Redoubled,
Until the senses darken with surfeit of longing
And the petals whirl against the thoughtless moon.
My damnation, then,
To have no strength to speak this loveliness to your eyes;
No rapture to snare you like a bird on the wing,
Only mocking phrases that fall empty on the night
And an unwillingness to weep.
Dearest, O my dearest, think now on the pale flame
And grieve you well for me.