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Apparition of Love

    Sweet ghost, why do you visit me
    as in other times our bodies visited each other?
    Your transparency dampens my skin
    coming together in caresses that can never happen
    no one ever received a kiss from a vanished face.

    But you insist, sweetness. I hear your voice,
    the same voice, the same tone,
    the same light syllables
    and the same deep breath of longing
    with which you dissolved in pleasure.

    And our final rest from love,
    then I am convinced, that I hear your name,
    the only part of you that hasn't dissolved
    and that continues existing, pure sound.
    I embrace what?
    The mass of air you have turned into.
    And I kiss, I kiss the nothingness intensely.
    My beloved destroyed being, why do you return
    and are you as real as you are illusory?

    I no longer can tell if you are a shadow
    or if you always were a shadow, and our story
    is fiction in a painfully deciphered book.
    Will I one day know your real body
    as today I know how
    to embrace the mist as one embraces
    a platonic ideal in space?
    Does desire endure for you who no longer are
    dear absent one, to persecute me gently?
    I never thought that the dead
    would have the same passion as in past days
    and that they could transmit it to us with kisses
    of blazing fire and multi-colored ice.

    Your burning visit consoles me
    Your burning visit desolates me
    Your visit, hardly a pittance of charity.

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Comments


  • Peteskid
    July 5

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    Wanting and denial here in these rich and purposely convoluted verses, so that the wish sound like denial, and the denials sound like impossibilities yet all that is here, seems and even the seeming quality is preferred to absence...love does not die, within us, and there is hope despite all things, distressing and gratefully seems we never lose hope...another amazing poem from this brilliant thinker...PK


  • Yemassee Moderators member
    June 23
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    I've also seen this poem translated with the title "Unity."

    Beautiful and painful, we all have memories, visitations of those gone (in one manner or another.) I can feel the pain in the words, but more than the pain, the questioning and the feelings of passion and need.