The Museum of Eterna's Novel

CHAPTER XV

FOR EVER-CHANGING ETERNA, AN ENDLESS, IMMUTABLE POEM

For Eterna:

At your feet, before either you or I is sure of the first word that says today begins for you, bend to me your amiable visage and lucid spirit, either frowning or with forehead serene, so that in it are shown your labors and your reposes; bend towards the grave thought that with my art I inspire; and today, more than the days before, when they made a Today for you of my own, I want severe and rigorous divinings of the mystery pulsing in your being and in the gracious line of your tiny, eternal steps, for now you are Matter, if I am your artist, and you are what I most hope for myself.

For I make your hope my hope. I didn’t bring it with me when I came, yet today I know hope, better than my own, your hope in me — I don’t want it for myself, nor would I have it without you. Now you know that if you let your faith fail, there will be no point, nothing will be left of me to die, not even hope, since everything of me dies in you.

CHANGES IN YOU.

Agitation, in the immortal, is your fantasy in love. Even if there were death, even if our heartbeats were numbered, you give yourself ardently to life’s pressures; your inspired being tries everything, and you call out everywhere so that nothing of your love is untested, so that nothing in it may sleep, even unexpected sleep; even if death could exist! Even if you had to learn and count each grain of sand.

Neither my love nor my mind had any warning of how you were yesterday.

I knew you anew, and loved you as you asked. With everything I already know and love of you, you made yourself a beautiful other: yesterday you wanted to be the being the Night showed you.

I still don’t know how to wait for you after you’ve come: in your genial changes you outstrip me, and even though I eagerly follow, my love cannot guess ahead of you. One day I’ll have a feeling for what you will and want to be each morning.

But in your ardent fictions, does it not sometimes happen that you are so far ahead of what I can guess that to see you transformed, stripped of your beauty, is always equally lovely? I love you for the first time with an entirely new love, and am thus unfaithful to the first; you make me unfaithful with your changes, and always in love with what I do not see in you. Is this not a death, the only kind that can happen in the fullness of love, because I love you forgetting what I have already loved?

I am still only an acolyte in the mystery of love, taught by your lighted eyes, and in your mobile accents. I vacillate, unable to recognize you amidst all the enchantments and mutations of your transfigurations, as you avidly renew your eternal beauty.

In the eternal, everything is, and this is how I may find myself bitter that I have ceased to love you, since you are always what I love; “another” love is possible in you, if you change so much that my memory cannot reach you, cannot find you. Let me learn. And later foretell.

NIGHT IS THE BEAUTY IN WHICH IT PLEASED YOU TO DRESS YESTERDAY

As if your eyes had thought themselves a part of the night’s vestment: stellar lights in them — but it wasn’t that, it was wishes of your soul, hardworking in their adornments and self-transfigurations, your spirit’s ardent fictions as it gives itself to fantasy and the force Beauty requires to protect your being from the near and involuntary cosmos — you feigned your eyes’ spoiled presumption — truly, you figure their disquiet — your vigilant concern was to live in exaltation, immune to the Forces of the mundane: Night, Beautiful-Sadness: you wanted to be beautiful and so you appeared, to the point that it gave me pain, for to equal you is impossible, and it’s impossible for any art to explain you.

You affirm the lights of your spirit — the day has no light, nor the night any purchase without your consent — you are unafraid to lose them, to be Night and to lose yourself in it, immense and untrammeled… And night has turned to today, it possesses the enigmatic night, and it possesses Departure, and nearby Dreaming — the departure is in its breast, invisible dreams trip us up — you listen to me with your breath agitated by the flutter of your full, confident heart and the skeins of your fantasy

You are deep night, with its ebony depths, heights of life in the^; domed headdress of the Milky Way, brilliant dimples at diverse distances, the immense, ample swing of the celestial vault.

Your thought is honored in your person, your vestments and motions, the statuary of the night, its subtle and magnificent path, and harmonious respiration in its full extension, your nearby step wakes the surrounding air, in the revolving processional towards the dawn your distant pace is congruent with all planes and summits. In you the “word” and the “voice” of the night are one; I heard its voice for the first time and in your hand I knew something even more prodigal: the touch of the night.

The night, which chooses its own precious, sparse, delicate and invariable adornments, not the day, whose oppressive dazzle we cannot avoid; the lunar paleness of your face blues in your black eyes and hair. We are capsized by both nearby voices and broad murmurs, vast ebonies that marble the heights and the depths alike. The night touches us, and we tremble, like its distant lights.

Night is life in beautiful sadness, but with hope’s flutterings, with voluntary, ornate, sparse, and elevated thoughts, this is how you made yourself, pale and dark, how you undid the distractions of immortality, how you gave yourself such beauty in the supreme and unhesitating predilections of your being, in spirituality’s reborn joys; let these joys defend your eternity and the Desire with which you have chosen to live it.

And you are the Night, as severe of aspect as your heart is lush with fervent invention.

THE DAY AJAR

I know who the “pale one” will be who can defeat me in your heart. He’s the one I sometimes meet on the way, who walks before me, fervently advancing along the walls and hedges. He twines roses in the fences; and in the whiteness of a thousand sparks with which the afternoon raises itself in light, he winds a band of darkest shadow around the roots of each tree, and he stretches a narrow ribbon of darkest shadow at the feet of the low fences of the countryside, and along the walls he runs a plank outlined in black, sets it “plumb” in the entire verticality and oscillation of the day, on the lake named Siesta. Little stains of darkness, dappled gray in the dazzling light, secrets kept from the Day at the foot of the rose bushes, as if the roses grew from this secret and the fragrance of the roses were the tears of this secret.

There is another man with the pallor of the artist and lover, another “pale one,” more loving, more artistic. He has no more life than what we give him. He’s the one who believes he’s found in me what I long to be: the Artist, he who even takes the shadows of things in hand, so that the Day does not subsume them, the Real in its transparency of being. The artist is he who loves everything and speaks everything.

He is invisible, if the light of the afternoon Siesta passes through him; dark in the Night, but his face is clear in its pallor and with the pallor of the moon and stars. When you think of him, I think of him.

You have eyes and hair of the darkest shade, they hate the light that lets things dodge the absorption of Siesta; tender things that love their shadows and humble love affairs, let the artist take them in hand, they don’t want to be absorbed into the transparent-making power of the Siesta and they wait, holding on to their shadows; they walk towards the Night, catching up their tulle skirts in their hands, skirts that tell them they exist: their shadows.

You intertwine your steps in the present with the Night, and you secret yourself from the call of the Day, of the President; you make your present nocturnal and love your past as dazzlement.

You love the night and sometimes in your pallor you are the night in your bestarredness, your eyes, your sighs, in the silence, in the non-present, in the Remembering. You. I believe in your pallor of love and remembering, not in the pallor that one day death will simulate in you.

You are the night where I saw my way

You carry me, you are the guiding night!

I call you illumined night,

Because you make the night’s light fresh,

The daylight wounds you, snuffs your world.

You are the night. I only found my way in you.

And only I

Discovered you

In night’s shadows.

HOW I MAY HOPE TO KEEP YOU

I will be defeated, but there’s only one thought that can give you the entire response to the Mystery of your being and of all being, and it’s mine. One day you’ll seek me out for it, in the pathways of eternity. I’ll tell you the word that only I possess and you’ll stay by my side year after year. I have the thought that explains all being, yours included. And now I search your portrait for the trace not of your being, but of how you are, because you are however we see you and know you.

DARLING BEING:

Nothing matters as you do, as we do; no work of man or of the world, nothing has a chance, nothing breathes as it does in you, what lightens or rests or bids farewell, for an instant, to the murmuring memory where recollection sleeps in you, if only for an instant. Not even your quick laugh, so noble, tremulous, and wet with tears; it’s my laugh, it is the word you have for me, the word that among all of your words alone finds comprehension in me; may the entire Future wait until I have come, and may it not linger after, Never shall another drink from your throat, from your being, like the artist who speaks to you now, who has found you, who follows you. And I don’t want you, the Wellspring, the eternal Child who still finds her first tears in this tender, fleeting laughter which sometimes I can elicit in congress with you and which seems to be the last sob of weeping like petals, opening with the day: tears, tears from the Wellspring, tears of hope, of “weep no more…”

IT COULDN'T BE

You will show me

Dolorous Eterna.

Pious, we wound ourselves

with oblivion’s kiss

it burns memory

but loveless leave us on this ground

Without this futile love.

Let it be when tears’ kiss presses

Our faces in what our bodies knew

supreme intimacy

When we feel passion’s last pain

And its greatest.

We’ll forge lethal

the sign

all pain

but with death.

The death asked for love’s

Initiation is not

the death lovers fear.

Day through night,

not night through the day.

SUBMISSION

If I cannot stay by your side

you must give me

a lover’s talisman.

Faithful as you are strong

you must forge oblivion’s kiss

fatality’s kiss, impossible kiss

here we submit our destinies.

And let tearing ourselves away

be our departure,

separating ourselves from when we were closest.

Pull our resigned destinies

first step of no return

out of our last caress

when we were the closest.

And we will not await

Love’s vanquishment

Tormented.

Your love slept while it could

I didn’t fall apart until you awoke.

I already know how it will be.

I’ve already known my love

impatient in the future’s ardent study

pulling us our gullible hands will say: come to me

later…

0 ETERNA, IN YOUR MOUTH NOTHING MORE BE SAID: I AM FLEETING

Suspense remained, the breath placid

murmuring quiet existence,

placid a faraway gaze, and a thought resting

amused for a quiet while

free from agitation or life’s demands

influencing the caring white hand

you placed on me, as if it were a breeze

and this is how I know the new paces of your thought.

Knowing your spirit’s ways in the cool pressure of

your palm

drinking with you the air you breathe,

it just vibrated with your voice, you said:

I am fleeting.

Below, at my gaze’s edge,

Your white hand

Like your black pupil wholly ardent, where

I don’t look, judging it full.

What you said, just now, without looking at me

Waiting in precious silence

gracious and assured of the answer you know

My enamored mind sought to surrender to you

with all its forces, immense, eternal.

This silence, Eterna, in a mouth subtlely smiling

trusting in love, this silence gentle and clear

only I have discovered this smiling light,

I would like to keep it.

And in my eternal memory I’ll have it

eternal as our love’s wealth of speech.

This silence

You hold this silence between your lips

so close to my happy contemplation

it provokes me.

To a lover’s rage against

the ephemeral

against death, in all my thoughts.

Rid yourself of the silence you toy with in love’s security

feigning hopelessness while you expect certainty

I have the answer you know already, it cannot be hidden

no matter the fictions of ceasing, of leaving

we call death.

So close, venturesome, looking at your throat

and your breast alive with respiration’s murmur

It comes and goes, is moved and loses itself

in opened mouths’ immense signification.

The air we drink in

the sound of rhythmic breathing

our breasts’ oscillation in unison with the ocean.

I loved Eterna

though I never hoped to be her lover

and today, how modestly

you gave me a beginning more real more

pristine, more inaugural than birth

when you said “Yes, I love you too.”

as if it were nothing

as if the magnificence of Life’s creation

didn’t light your prodigious words!

Yes, I am as one who trembles

one who trembles happily in a beautiful dream

and, hurt, because wakening robs him

nevertheless reality awaits him

and the wakening that keeps her words,

I am here, trembling

without receiving the gift, not believing it

not intimately receiving it, surest joy of my being

without faith

in your love’s present, what before I begged for

with lamentation

this love was given to me so often in dreams

of which wakefulness robbed me.

Even if I could

today the real is more daring for me than any dream

tell me again, call me, wake me

I still haven’t the courage

to draw back wakefulness, morning’s curtain, make

this dream distant in exchange for the real.

KEEPING COMPANY

“It isn’t that I didn’t know

but I was late”

she told you, strangely disturbed me, my voice,

submerged in contentment

the first time I met you.

Fortune teller, now my foot is on your threshold

it introduced us.

You are wise, but there is no place, no instant

where you are.

Or how you look, talk, and appear,

only your soul knows love,

and there can’t be anything more in it

anything more in me.

Only I was late

because the fences said as I walked

coming here, walking again

“It was never love, it can never be.”

and truly there were flowers withering

in the fences, in the hour of siesta, all light.

I told the countryside fences and walls

“I have left it to her, she must give me her love.”

I know how to be only love,

neither deity nor knowledge

nor the world, nor human

I scarcely have

her

company.

THE SHADOW IN LOVE'S DAYLIGHT

What is most loving in my love for you is that I think of you as uncreated, eternal; I see you as fragile, docile, dressed in mortality; and I think that you too will know a day when your face and hands feign death.

I’m certain that this dream will reach you. This thought — the thought of your Heart going mute, already without what my love heard, without this beat repeating in you, always and only: “my lover”—this thought is pain but not pallor, it torments my earthly existence, but it does not dismay my certainty.

A silence in your breast, a hand that does not reach out to follow mine as it calls to your palm, this is sadness, it’s everything lived culminating in the total pain of an instant. Everything we were is made pain, from when your heart forgot all the words that it gave to life, preferring to always and only to beat out: “my lover”—until this terrifying silence!

If you or I has to be the one to hear this last palpation, if you or I has to be the one who first experiences the silence of a heart, either mine or yours, may whoever of us knows the greater pain also die; do not cry out, wishing for one heartbeat more, as if it meant the whole pain of the Earth, all of Life, but instead seek a new encounter, to wake together, it’s as close as every waking, every dream.

Let’s always say so to each other.

Sometimes, when I’m by your side

Your eyes close halfway, and forget me.

Forgotten and close to you

I am like one who watches all night

at the head of the bed of a sleeping lover.

But you’re not asleep, you’ve gone; you always love

But not always me.

So I keep watch

over the links forged between our hours

and unknown to you

I ardently seek

a new link, invisible and strongest of all

but I can’t work on it if you’ve already turned away.

I’ll always fear

your returning past

this present, when you leave me.

LIVE, CHARACTER!

This is your doubting eyes task

to tend an ardent feeling

to sweep your gaze

over all you fear

to think of what you love, even adore,

what might hurt you.

Discover, discover!

I will look where you look.

If you don’t find it, who will?

Today if I am found where you are.

You are Totalove, and I am Clarity.