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CAVEAT
There is a place called |
May 24, 2005
Pygmalion said, 'marble can be warm if you just sleep on its feet long enough.' Like a good devout, you have been standing alone from sunup til sundown, in front of my pedestal, waiting to light the pyres at my side. Despite their blazes, they are always, a poor substitute for the fervent thermals I have heard so often. The throng of supplicants heat the temple with their foolishness, with their courage, as they agonize, love and die. My skin is coated, lacquered with the soft sheen of tempered gold. I have known every kind of incense, felt every delicate petal laid, on my open palms. I have silently cried and smiled along with every hope broken, with every life born. I know I have heart somewhere between the hollowness of my structure. The years of seeing, hearing, knowing everything have made pliant a part of my being. If I say that even a stone can yearn, will you do more, than just sleep at my feet? You have always looked at me with your head unbowed. Your eyes glisten, but with dreams. Too long have these unbidden words stay locked within unmoving lips-- 'that when you leave, it would be I falling to my knees to sleep where you stood, just a moment ago.' Cradled by a warmth as precious as your offerings, as real as I am. Poetry is but a pale echo of what you are. It cannot grasp how you imbue my senses when you are beside me. So much so that even if put together, my memory and my eloquence can only render a silhouette. Nothing more. I ache to sculpt you, carve you from words that would have been your planes and curves and angles. And yet you can only shimmer on the edges of my consciousness. I only have a picture of sunlight-punctured holes, tracing your shape, elusive and yet existing. I will lay my chisel down. Cover the mold. Brush away the white dust that had enveloped my hands for so long. The white sheet brought down over your hair, eyes, nose, lips, neck, shoulder...it weighs heavy, resisting. I cannot tell when I shall have the strength or the right to trace those contours again, or if I still want to. I wonder what Pygmalion felt, as he slept beside the feet of his marble love. Was he constantly aware of its never-changing coolness or was his warmth, his honest, helpless love enough to get him through the night? I smell your hair from the words "'patch of sunlight". I hear your laugh from the word "longing". If I can conjure your image from mixed and matched syllables, is that so wrong? I have nothing left to work on. Only these nouns and the likes I grab from thin air, impotent in trying to duplicate the reality of you. Can I not even have that respite of creating a simple and insubstantial mimic of a love from my eloquence? So I can sleep on its feet, dreaming that they are yours? These sheaves cradle nothing warm. Just ghosts: beautiful ones, sad ones, happy ones but never warm. A writer can never approximate silence in his works. In written literature, it is only the spaces between words. For someone who loves, well, it is a surrender. Dearest, as a writer and someone who loves, my silence will approximate my surrender to your wish, to what you are to me and to the knowledge that if this is the last thing I will ever lay at your feet then it is everything I have. Tell me then, to stop, when love all but cascades in grateful torrents.
I have melded with it as it pools at your feet. Glimmering with concentrated intensity. Proud that it is pure. Drink from it dearest, before it dries up. Let it merge with your blood and the air you breathe. Let it return to the ground, with my all my love intact, as tears that will soon become rain. Gentle, silent drizzles cooling you down again, flowing towards where it came from, trembling, at your feet. blue rogue |
