Promised Land

Terre promise

Sous ta peau je vois couler les sources des fleuves-mères
au-delà des collines hautes de ton visage
les vallons interdits font vivre
tels fourmillements telles peuplades

Moïse d’en haut j’étreins
toute ta carte
terre promise terre refusée

	Promised land
Beneath	shimmerings of sense, the simplest attraction imagines depths from sight abstracted as touch penetrates the skin into invisible flesh
your	attributes are all you are but capable of assimilation one day at lunch a chicken-wing became you as well as several onlookers absorbed in white flashes of teeth
skin	taut enough to write on surrounds her almost wholly but the subject of the narrative lies in the orifices
I	naming coincidentally the locus of the promise cannot draw nearer its object existing only before it
see	the land dissolved in mist yet unmistaken unfigured yet compact from that point peripheral other to significance the eye would commemorate only a lash remains of vision more than sight
flowing	process not structure disorder self-maintained rhythms first felt in the blood linking river to river the garden forever encircled
the sources	promise beginnings denied ancestral lines converging to common pursuits and places the dance turning inward from surface discretion
of the rivers	nothing is known save that the sunken island transfigured them to sea
maternal	paradox, self-substitution the landscape fills out from within like Combray from a teacup its membrane undisturbed
At that moment she stood in the center of the universe. The sun illuminated her like a pyre. Her mouth was open to speak. Beneath her clothing her body was infinite. I was reduced to a point. No description of the universe could endure as long as that moment.
Beyond	all models of perception stretches of absence reward exceeded appetites
the high	jutted crags wind-eaten by the desert pliant cones await the eye’s credulity
hills	the indifferent climb I aspire airless to ascend imbibing with an infant tongue sweet milk sublimed to snow
of your face	only the defects beckon a sometime blemish or timeless a smile whose wound lies deeper as substance transcendently distant belies its accidents
the valleys	of earthly delight are lush with the fruit of glaciers depth from height is endowed a woman’s body like language signifies through contrast
forbidden	to self-denegation recompense ever delayed perfection unto death image unknowable never yet innocent spero quia absurdum
nourish	parched hopes of salvation tearless eyes transfixed on vision become sight had we forty years more to stand in its presence
such multitudes	surround the central pyre unsinged by the conflagration at an awesome distance the fire consumes me
such peoples	whose baleful idols withhold from us the sacred precinct disfigure them to dust for man to be new-molded
At the doorstep time and space are immeasurable. No dream-change from together to apart, but the wrenching of great differences of degree. My arms held the earth’s circumference. I still bear the mark of its mountains and oceans.
Moses	face to face with otherness led the anonymous race to the sunswept expanse of desire
from above	the sunset and the seas an island innocent of life its surface already quadrillated in centerless interdiction
I embrace	more than air in indifference to know love and land’s refusal realizes our lives’ equidistance
the map	lies flat upon mountains yet creased by meandering roadbeds actual tracks of potential return to the center, or best exceed the periphery
entire	at a proper distance hair to heels in vision each gestural transformation leaves desire’s kernel fixed
land	wet with tears and milk my son’s hard palms shall press the heat of your soil but not even in love’s dry death shall I lie within you
promised	unique chimaera to each her body led us forth long arms in her hair like serpents mouths open at her breasts on the cinders of domesticity we lay in alien bondage feet twitching with lust for the hillocks of sand
land	to which space of openness windblown scent of lilies footfalls of far caravans sun-flashes at the horizon
refused	imagination’s blasphemy in vision too nearly possession only ineffable absence inspires the sightless singer
Else would cease the knowledge beyond time that death and life signify. I taste yet now too much the sugared wine. The sole sign exceeds the fragility of the promise.

Avatars of the muse
i
	I see of you but what a child could see your hair whatever color and your eyes' youth flowering for another and for me verses to sing desire’s melancholy But being One you cannot multiply your infertility’s my guarantee I love your absence absent my success if you could love me you’d love someone else Stay frozen then forever and be mine Yet the geology of flowing ice is but a viscous science of decay while in a teaspoon of unplanned recall long centuries of dying are unlearned reader of Proust you’ve not forgotten this
ii
	All language writes itself a Madeleine I learn to live from moments without life to see by odor’s sightless memory of roses shut unbloomed within your album or love in sacrificing human hearts to my insouciant muse so rich in time whose love-tales all reproachful of my own I have no heart to voice Where immobility is permanence absence surrounds her person like a night I would not dare a closer view of it changing the little that in time we must with what new song could I recompensate the ceaseless retrogression of the muse?

Half-sonnets from abroad
i
	This spurious sweetness conceals the dream’s bad debt to the daylight the bent of an old relation subsists in an absence of substance so I will speak not of love but privation, nor even of friendship but the wry joy of endless awaiting
ii
	No more nostalgia the present is equally gone with the past we have grown older not closer nor farther but across the ocean face to face in recognition Belonging’s not for us nor separation this nameless being-for’s our authenticity
iii
	In the solemnity of old desire no longer knowing physical from moral I ask of you no token of consent still less acknowledged reciprocity exchanging words or silence awaiting or receiving our distance is our presence
iv
	A cabin in the woods beside a lake the well-worn idyll of the Suisse Romande know I what populates your solitude the petty comforts of your intimacy? I would know all these things and yet renounce all knowing but a postcard from afar to know your landscape is to know the rest
v
	There’s no love without irony Madonnas stripped on bloody shrines their pedestals ground down like bone we burn what we adore or else indifferent hearts conceal a sacred precinct others might call love—you shake your head, you smile

Envoi

We sang the marvelous immortal flesh
as if it needed not our singing
regeneration's ruse deferred
in paeans of thanksgiving

Of love's young opera the music
fades but in the words
we hear the music