“In my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.”

- W.H. Auden


I like watching your face in the dark,
With its subtle shadows
And big, sealed eyes;
Hair fallen, like me, in your quiet face.
I like the touch of your soft limbs,
Gently or furiously,
Your sighing and hunching form,
Now quiet,
Naked in darknesses,
Sleeping, certain;
Motionless
Beside the vestige of my awkward embrace.

I lie awake, alive, watching,
And you stir and ask why,
“Because I like watching your face in the dark.”
You say it’s because I'm a poet
But it is the other way around.
Entirely human, this evening; living, yours.

With the twilight, in dreams whose shadows swim across your forehead,
All memory and hope did cease.
In your languid corpse - faithful channel of renunciation -
The embers of the ancient sun gently died. In you
The naked and surrendering light collapsed.

And now, as the timid darkness approaches my silence -
In your maritime harvest of dusk-dyed surfaces,
In the murmurs of your breath and formless thoughts,
I establish my nocturnal shelter: immutable, chaste.

In the swaying silence, my drowsy heartbeat
Changes into a slow sound of footsteps:
You carry me, anonymous inhabitant of my thoughts, venturing out coolly
Impossibly, to meet the interminable woman who dreams on my behalf.

But, alas, even as I watch the opaque sounds sinking,
Drawing my consciousness into their own darkness;
Even as the vision and the shadow, the body and its paramours,
Become entangled as one -
Because of your hair and nakedness (extended across the room
Flooding my thoughts with their stretched out shadows)
I find myself re-exposed, within the blue half-light, the solitary early hours.

Amerced in a second silence, as though from within the hidden core of love,
I find myself once more, drinking up the night, trying not to drown.
I desire with my whole being, with the same power that my silence entreats;
A hidden force which I am unable to conquer or absorb or escape,
And so I seek its consent in you, my love:
‘Let me come to rest in your stillness;
A hush so remote and so candid, so far-away
That when I cast my anonymous soul into your dreams,
It is as though I were casting a net into oblivion;
The net of my kisses.’

With quiet heart; with faithful eyes; with prayerful calm:
I celebrate your limitless beauty as though you are absent,
As though you have been drowned, swallowed up
By the night’s own silence; by the dull rhythm of your own breathing.

Alas, in this pale husk of your being;
In my dream of your dreams;
In your vast and unnavigable dreaming refuge,
There happen to exist limitless graves and wombs for me,
Countless soils and skies,
The enigmas of all of life and death, disclosed, for me.

And I feel sad sometimes,
When it feels as though the only thing I have to offer in return
Are poems,
Like this one.

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