lightness & laughter

floating, she used to whisper ~

no weeds would dance more freely than her hair,
when the floods come to wipe away
every sin. no breath caressed the skin
 ~ or so she had convinced even the most indifferent lover ~
more ecstatically than her own
(more tenderly, when the moon was right).

when she was finally ready to see
that the sweet virtues of lightness were still
a lie, it was already too late:
they had all been fooled.
the lovers, even in the most ardent arms,
would still remember her breath and even the flood,
she feared, would carry her away with more grace
than a tree.

it was too late to protest, too late to explain:
quietly, she sat down in a corner
and burst into laughter.

modern waiting in strong colours or, if you prefer, harmonic functions of blue, gold and green

the blueness of things calls out your name.
the tides of my waiting never reach your footsteps.
i remember telling you
photography is the time of death.
i remember the green edge of the light
falling on your lips,
while you answered with a smile
you only understood irrational numbers
and, on some evenings of particular haze,
irrational time signatures.
then you bent over for a kiss.

you taught me the law of gravity
attaching me to my pain.
other equations you left unsolved,
or perhaps the solution eluded you
as well.
how to prevent the sound of you
blossoming in every wound,
this is indeed no smooth manifold
with a vector of harmony.

i sit here at the table of waiting,
combing the golden sea of my hair
with a golden comb which rewrites
the laws of such poisonous
fluid dynamics.
oh perhaps things were simpler
in the old days,
or Laplace's girl had short
and curly hair,
much more luminous eyes.

don't come back, not even once.
if you do, my golden lava
will fasten your ankles,
my mouth will encircle yours
with the hunger of the last moth.
then, only then, will you perhaps grasp
the constant of sorrow.

some more - perhaps avoidable? - but certainly ffflaneur-contagious notes :-):


1. this intermezzo from my usual dark broodings (intermezzo?) is dedicated to the tech nerds who do me the honour of walking on the floating bridge. oh, and to that unknown Benjamin A. Itza-Ortiz who has won my eternal admiration for writing his PhD on the subject of: "The C*-algebras Of Irrational Time Homeomorphisms Of Suspensions". Let's just hope he won't google his dissertation to come across my humble homage :-) Because this could be read also - also! - as a homage to these bold heroes of our time, even if it looks otherwise. oh the twisted ways of that infamous 'feminine logic' which gets slandered on some blogs, in good classical company (Lermontov) :-)

2. for my other readers, who will surely not understand how they have managed to live so far with no idea whatsoever of the existence of such things as "approximation by harmonic functions" - what a lovely, irresistible name! they would be solutions to Laplace's equation, mind you - "on subsets of Riemannian manifolds", which are usually defined as "a smooth manifold" - a smooth manifold! can one find a more appealing metaphor? i am so sorry i can't take the credit for it- "with a smooth section of the positive-definite quadratic forms on the tangent bundle", i can only offer this in guise of consolation: Thomas Adès's "Piano Quintet" (2000), which apparently makes extensive use of irrational time signatures.