“No, she is an autumn crocus, really and completely.”
“Sir, science requires categories.”
“Her red pussy, the arch of her back,
are they categories?”
“Um, yes, but almost abstract,
like an autumn crocus by Van Doesburg.”
IV
Even now, the welts and bruises, swellings and tattoos,
love’s injuries hidden underneath her flimsy frock,
and I fear this will just go on and on, this bitter furtive
scratching and clawing at her miniature no-man’s-land.
We’re forgetting two things, by God,
the different ways of being
and the different ways of not being.
I fear that you’re trapped between no longer being
and not yet having been. What do you say to that?
V
Even now, completely still, she lay excessively alone,
abandoned left and right, a numbness in the roof of her mouth,
and I, as motionless as her in my own cell, heard
the clink and rattle of the chain around her ankle.
“When will you be together?” my mother asked.
I said, “In the realm of King Baudouin,
when the world will be truthful,
when the Yellow River is clear,
in a month of Sundays,
at the noon of midnight?”
VI
Even now, I remember how, in the morning, tired and slow
after making languid love, she hung her head almost shyly,
a duck that slid over the lake and nipped at the water,
before diving down and biting me and then never again.
You could also say, “The roots seek what’s clammy,
the blades find the sun
and the plant forms itself
between two equilibriums,
between one longing and the other.”
VII
Even now, I tie her pitch-black hair up in cocky
combs, plumes and quills and worship her as a totem
and a cross in my house that quickly, awkwardly
transforms into a temple to Love, the furtive goddess.
Soldiers painted a cross
on their shields and won the battle.
But you’re in thrall to a game
where only losing counts.
VIII
Even now, all those rooms and nights and creamy nakedness
and all that sleeping after and before and the smell of heather.
How she snored when I asked if she was happy now and how
she stroked the bolster that had ended up between us.
Until the eighth century
one kissed the Pope’s hand.
But then there was a woman who kissed his hand
and wouldn’t let go.
That very night the Pope chopped that hand off.
That’s why one now kisses his feet.
IX
Even now, her limbs, all four of them at work, exhausted,
and her freshly-washed hair hanging down over her warm cheeks
as she grabbed my neck with her ankles, a giggling executioner,
beheaded, presenting me with the cool and glistening wound.
Just as the cell shapes itself to its minuscule prey,
obeying that which it will consume
and warming itself on its pseudopods,
uniting with it.
Admit it, admiration is called for.
X
Even now, I raise a flag and put my arms up in the air,
crying, “Comrade!” But she was the one who surrendered.
Because on the battlefield I heard her splutter and rage
in her mother’s accent, uttering filthy syllables.
Love, cinders and scrap metal,
bread and water
love, wake up
and approach from the void
that freezes me.
XI
Even now, when I am on the verge of crossing over
to that other life, she leads me as through black water,
ogling me and leering at me through her dangerous lashes,
laughing at me as I, drenched through, ascend her golden bank.
Above all else, without exception,
the forest path we follow is a labyrinth.
XII
Even now, her body is carmine and gleaming with sweat,
her openings all smooth and slippery with baby oil.
Yet what I know of her remains a strange gesture,
a thing with no echo, full of bitterness, chance and remorse.
Professor Policard said, “It’s so hot!
I have the impression a certain heaviness
has entered our synapses,
that in weather like this our neurons swell.”
XIII
Even now, I forget about the gods and their ministers,
she is the one who shatters, condemns and forgets me,
she, who is of all seasons but especially the winter,
growing colder and more beautiful the more I die.
Why don’t you say anything about the coldness of silence?
The self-satisfied destructive silence of Ajax,
Iole, Niobe, Achilles, you name it,
all prayers I wrote in my dotage
despite knowing better.
XIV
Even now, among all women there is not one like her,
not one whose furious mouth surprised me so much.
My foolish soul would tell of her if it were able,
but my soul has been plundered and razed to the ground.
And with the self-assurance of sleepwalkers
we keep skirting the issue.
XV
Even now, how she quivered with exhaustion and whispered,
“Why are you doing this? I will never let you go, my king.”
There was no colder monarch than me and recklessly
I showed her how the King’s one eye was watering.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek to the President of the Royal
Society in November 1677: