In the hush between chords,
when neither ask nor answer
has yet begun,
the café opens—
There, time slackens,
and, sitting down,
joins the guests—
for the weight
of a word not spoken,
and a face not fled
from being caught
between going out
and coming back in
to its diurnal mask—
too like in appearance
to an unnamed burial urn.
The roots converge:
amare—to love,
but also amarus—
to taste the bitter,
like the grounds
at the bottom of the glass,
lacquered to the brim
with a liquor rubicund.
And nepos,
grandchild or ghost,
carried forward
in a line that forgot
it once knew wings,
and the mirrors’ unseen sides.
Do you see her still?
At the veil’s hem,
half-cloud, half-gleam,
she passes the mind’s
mundane husk—
without pause,
but with a poise
out of which poeisis is made—
that bringing-forth
of eyes erupting
with Eros illumed,
a serpent welded
to her flame—
to a blasting bliss.
Now turned to you
in vow—
drawing back its bow,
that arc of reaching,
the ache of span,
sliding without exclaim,
in silence that is smooth
like the finest scarf of silk.
In such places—
small cafés
beneath the city’s
palimpsest of sighs—
one may catch
a fragment
of the vanished tongue,
with a dent that fits
the choicest bite—
a key, a word,
like a coin
placed in the mouth
of the dead,
to pay the fare—
but also to say:
I remember
what you were
before forgetting.
There,
the hand stirs,
not to hold,
but to lift—
what was once hers:
the flame,
the veil,
the hour’s wing
her eyes have come
to mean—or meet—
