the gift

she woke me up, proudly holding flowers out to me. she had picked them all pink, of course. seven roses, two more than her age. i took her in my arms and kissed her, but she was obviously bothered by something. i laid the bouquet, delicately sprinkled with little white flowers whose name i didn't know, beside me, and turned to her. it didn't take long before she started to talk. 'you know, i will always look after you', she said. 'i will give you coughing syrup and wrap my shawl around your neck and mouth, and i will give you my winter coat and i will tremble in the cold'.

i felt something like a dark knot in my belly, a pain expanding in my body, but i couldn't react. she continued, quickly: 'you are the most beautiful in the world, nobody is as beautiful as you'. it was already too much, i burst out: 'no, no, this can't be, you are, and even more beautiful'. she looked upset, and brushed my words away, in an almost angry tone which left me no option but silence, again: 'no, don't argue with me. it is you who is the most beautiful'.

she hid her face in her hands: ' i don't want to see the world's face ever again, i only want to look at you'.

no lover has ever told me more beautiful words. i told her that, that nobody, ever, had had such words for me - yet this seemed to throw her further into some kind of distress which at first i didn't understand, she kept repeating, with a growing look of desperation on her face: 'but i don't have any words left to tell about this, how beautiful you are, i can't find any words, what am i going to do now, what?'

suddenly, she stood up, covered her ears with her hands and said, calmly, as if she had reached some definitive conclusion, witnessed an irrevocable truth: 'if there are no more words left for me, then... i'll explode. ' booooom - still covering her ears, she let herself fall on the bed, pretending that she was dead.

only if one looked very carefully, her breath would be visible, gently coming in and out her mouth, trembling for a moment in the air before scattering upon the glimmering roses. only a rose, it struck me amidst my perplexity, such numbness that i couldn't even rise my hand to touch her, only a rose can be without inner combustion, when there are no more words to tell of beauty and love. yet we all forget this truth, as we grow up, and the art of exploding, the only one which could give the real measure of our being, is forever lost.

.

for a while

from time to time, a bridge rises out of the darkness of the heart.

there is the grace of the unforeseen, gestures finding each other, as if in a mirror, there is the gentleness of wonder, the wild joy of being, finally, understood, held in the palm of another, across the abyss.
souls strive toward light as pale crocuses, an orange flame of love tearing through them, toward the sky. for a while, there is knowing and sweet unknowing, mouths and fingers fit as if pieces of a puzzle which fall into place, for a while, the death one carries within suddenly doesn't matter, there is the glimpse of skin aglow with shared silences, there is green.

then the bridge recedes into the darkness of hearts.

..

this is reality

why is it that you need to show three glasses when even one glass holds more emptiness than wine could ever fill? do you think that paint coming off the wall symbolizes loss and decay of the soul - generally speaking? or perhaps your own, tiny wound? do you think that flowers lose petals for the sake of your weeping? don't you see that you are still saying this and that, and your speech is flowing over the brim of every empty glass you might show?

i haven't invented anything, i pleaded, this is what i found on the balcony when i could finally bring myself to open that door, there was even a small heap of ashes there, which i could not get into my frame. this is exactly what i saw. somebody smoked there every night, the window wide-open, before leaving. some-body. a body pushing against the wall. this is what was left behind. this is reality.

you haven't looked properly.

furiously, after much pondering and fighting against myself, i weighed all the lines of the composition and went around them for many days, in search of the perfect angle. i removed one glass. still, it didn't seem enough. with one glass left, i was much closer to the truth, it seemed. yet it too needed to be broken into pieces. i handed you the barren landscape.

still overflowing, i see.

why the many crumbles, when even one grain of sand is enough to reflect the moon?

like this, like this? i asked, scraping off this layer of my self, and another one, and another still. when the new, perfectly empty vistas of my gaze presented themselves to you, i myself had long been gone, fading away like a whisper or some animal's breath in the icy air.

yet what one stared at now, from beyond the silence, was nothing less than three empty glasses, stained, full of ashes and dregs, placed on an old print of one of her photographs, fallen petals scattered across the table, paint coming off the mildewed walls of the balcony where someone would smoke late at night, and once bit her lips when kissing her against the frozen window, dust on the wooden table, the wet grayness of the air - each of the thousand colours alive and exact, each of the myriads of hues precisely delineated, the smallest detail of the smallest curve and angle present with all its impossible truthfulness.

..

come spring

..

black calla

they often long for what could render all questions useless, or so they seem to believe: a single, perfect - because beyond any naming, untouched by the notion of presence - flower.

at other times, though, they find themselves longing for neither the flower nor the skin against which it rests. they seem to yearn for precisely that which only a word could bring into presence, the contrast between the dark of the petal and the ivory shimmer of skin. a single word, which could, then, redeem their lives, even if for just one moment, the perfect moment when the shadow of the black calla merges with the warmth of flesh.



..