My Bitter One, My Sweet
My Bitter One, My Sweet
If you were to vanish, my bitter one, some night without a shore,
I'd go beautifully insane and head down to the blind river,
with a sack full of sick clay and a spine made out of kindling,
to build you from scratch again with these two bare hands of mine.
An endless labor, I know — an hourglass filled with butterflies —
to raise you back from the warm dust, my sweet and bitter one,
like Pygmalion, the sick man, eyes burned by white sleeplessness —
come on now, move, Galatea, you statue made of ash!
If you were to vanish, my bitter one, I'd walk to the land of ice
to carve you out of long icicles and out of the silence of waters,
to dress you in a drizzle of frost and in shirts of fallen snow,
and then you'd be free to leave wherever some thieving spring might please.
If you were to truly fall, in the moment of your great rapture,
I'd come to you quietly, like a snowfall with no witnesses,
to ransom you back from the angels with all the gold inside me,
with my tollgate made of darkness and with my stopped clock.
And afterward I'd go back down, humbled, illusory as a shadow,
toward the home I've always had: a garret in purgatory,
where nothing grows on the glass but handless clocks and blinded moths,
and I learn, syllable by syllable, how your face is spelled.
If you were to vanish, my bitter one, my sweet, from all I am,
from my laughter of broken glass, from my weeping made of salt,
I'd go looking for you inside me, through galleries of silent sleep,
and I'd build you up out of myself, one brick of silence at a time.
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