To love is to reconstruct, when you are away,
your steps, your silences, your words,
and to pretend to follow your thoughts
when unmoving at last by me side, you fall silent.
Love is a secret rage,
an icy and diabolic pride.
To love is not to sleep when in my bed
you dream between my circling arms,
and to hate the dream in which, beneath your brow,
you abandon yourself, perhaps in other arms.
To love is to listen at your breast,
until my greedy ear is glutted,
to the noise of your blood and the tide
of your measured breath.
To love is to absord you young sap
and join our mouths in one river-bed
until the breeze of your breath
impregnates my entrails forever.
Love is a mute, green envy,
a subtle and shining greed.
To love is to provoke the sweet moment
in which your skin seekd my awakened skin,
to gratify the nocturnal appetite
and to die once more the same death—
provisional, heart-rending, dark.
Love is a thirst, like that of a wound
that burns without being consumed or healing,
and the hunger of a tormented mouth
that begs for more and more and is not sated.
Love is an unaccustomed luxury
and a voracious gluttony, always empty.
But to love is also to close our eyes,
to let sleep invade our bodies
like a river of darkness and oblivion,
and to sail without a course, drifting;
because love, in the end, is indolence.
If, at a given moment, everyone would say
with one word what he is thinking,
the six letters of DESIRE would form an enormous luminous
scar,
a constellation more ancient, more dazzling than any
other.
And that constellation would be like a burning sex
in the deep body of night,
like the Gemini, for the first time in their lives,
looking each other in the eyes and embracing forever.
Suddenly the river of the street is filled with thirsty
creatures;
they walk, they pause, they move on.
They excange glances, they dare to smile,
they form unpredictable couples…
There are nooks and benches in the shadows,
riverbanks of dense indefinable shapes,
sudden empty spaces of blinding light
and doors that open at the slightest touch.
For a moment, the river of the street is deserted.
Then it seems to replenish itself,
eager to start again.
It is paralyzed, mute, gasping moment,
like a heart between two spasms.
But a new throbbing, a new pulsebeat
launches new thirsty creatures on the river of the street.
They cross, crisscross, fly up.
They glide along the ground.
They swim standing up, so miraculously
no one would ever say they’re not really walking.
They are angels.
They have come down to earth
on invisible ladders.
They come from the sea that is the mirror of the sky
on ships of smoke and shadow,
they come to fuse and be confused with men,
to surrender their foreheads to the thighs of women,
to let other hands anxiously touch their bodies
and let other bodies search for their bodies till they’re
found,
like the closing lips of a single mouth,
they come to exhaust their mouths, so long inactive,
to set free their tongues of fire,
to sing the songs, to swear, to say all the bad words
in which men have concentrated the ancient mysteries
of flesh, blood and desire.
They have assumed names that are divinely simple.
They call themselves Dick or John, Marvin
or Louis.
Only by their beauty are they distinguishable from men.
They walk, they pause, they move on.
They exchange glances, they dare to smile.
They form unpredictable couples.
They smile maliciously going up in the elevators of hotels,
where leisurely vertical flight is still practices.
There are celestial marks on their naked bodies:
blue signs, blue stars and letters.
They let themselves fall into beds, they sink into pillows
that make them think they’re still in the clouds.
But they close their eyes to surrender to the pleasures
of their mysterious incarnation,
and when they sleep, they dream not of angels but of
men.
There’s no proof of existence
that is greater than this fate:
living without seeing you
and dying in your presence!
This limpid recognition:
loving what’s never been seen
and waiting for the unseen;
this falling with no landing
is the anguish of thinking
given I die I exist.
II
If you are there everywhere,
on land and in the water,
in the air encasing me
and in voracious fire;
if you go there everywhere,
traveling with me in my thoughts,
in the heaving of my breath
and in my blood’s disarray,
are you not, Death, in my life,
water, fire, dust and wind?
IX
If I keep you imprisoned,
and caress you and hide you;
if I feed you in the depths
of my most intimate wound,
if my death gives you your life
and my frenzy such delights,
what will become of you, Death,
when, when I must leave this world,
untying this tangled knot,
you too will have to leave me?
Spanish version § French version § Italian version
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