THE KISS IN THE NIGHT
THE KISS IN THE NIGHT
I gave you the kiss like a fruit grown on the branch of silence,
and the night opened its box of stars like a watchmaker
counting wingbeats in place of the dead seconds;
beneath our eyelids our eyes spoke in the alphabet of the old sea,
and the Moon, a torch of bone, led us down the corridor of the water.
The muse of the sea sighed in her channel like a glass lightly struck,
with a secret voice never heard before, a symphony without ears,
for that sound ran straight into the bones of love,
sweet trickle, spring of salt, artery cut into the sand —
and we were its bed, two children hollowed out by so much longing.
The wave danced with the shoulders of the night, my arm held you like the anchor
that holds not the ship but the whole sea in its palm,
and we floated like two stars lit at the far end of a long dream,
following love's compass, its needle sick with the boundless,
innocent of the divine in us, which rose in our chests like the sea.
The air was coolness with a warm center, like bread pulled from the oven,
our faces trembled the way water trembles when a star falls into it,
and we beat the wings of happiness, thin, of gold leaf,
the night stood around us like scenery, glittering with its blue shiver,
writing with lips of stars the story that could not be said aloud.
On the silent shore it smelled of a lover's perfume and of leaving,
our souls flowered with that flower which begs: do not forget,
the sand shifted under us like a memory caving in,
and we sank into longing the way the sun sinks into itself,
slowly, without regret, with the dignity of a thing that burns.
We did not care what would become of your heart, of my heart,
for they had already become a single shell on the seafloor,
holding the sound of the sea inside it, like a witness we would lose;
and I understood then that happiness is a gentle form of mourning,
a light that knows it is passing — and burns for exactly that reason.
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