When you were here: imagery, metaphor,
metonymy. After you left, life was life, as it
should be. After you left, I turned to the velvet
comfort offered by things. In all my wine glasses,
half-empty, I saw chandeliers of tubelights. Not
chataeux but spartan apartments with a few books.
The walls of my mornings peeled off, giving me a gift
I knew I had paid for. My memory made you a conscientious
thief, stealing everything but glances. The cables of our elevator
snapped, and we had never bothered with staircases. Our inside
edges should have raced to long leg, but we had played on, no, along.
On some nights, the void became a celebration, the silence a triumphal cry.
Other nights, yearning in my belly, a touch that would set off an unscientific
electricity. I put away your maps, useless in uncharted territory. Had the scaffolding
not collapsed, I would never have known of the frescoes on the floor. After you left, the trawlers
in the middle of our seas continued to bob about. But there is no temple-calm on our shores.
For us, no existence on sand, on the land.
