Forgetting

At evening
the sky is blazing yellow
and you stand at the foot of the staircase
wearing your soul on your face.

Those eyes half drawn away from light
with the boundless ecstasy of grief,
so fathomless,
in these last hours of falling light.

Your body twisted in this dance of light
along with the motion of your heaving breast
dusts frozen limbs on the memory of our dreams.

For twenty years have I lived in doubt
in the moment between the shadow of being
and the fear of pain (Or is it the moment of fear
before the pain and the moment of pain
after forgetting?).

For twenty years have I desired beauty
to call that sleepsunk moment beautiful,
the moment after pain and before forgetting.

But now that I have seen fear at the heart of light
and found peace in an infant’s cry of death,
your beauty so stainless is impossible to bear.

Your face draped in the glow of sunset,
your beauty in this evanescent falling light,
so impossible to touch and not cause decay,
inspires boundless dread.

This unbearable horror of beauty
and the fear of light on that evening face;
your heavy breath and heaving bosom
writhing in this speechless trance before pain
insufferable in this moment of fading light and forgetting.

With the motion of a dream
you come towards me
and light falls with the sound of death
in water.

Dream,
dance and light.

Rituals of dancemen
counting the fall of light,
one by one
in the circling glow of the stream.

The ghost of memory leaps to faith
for you my love, so dreadful in beauty,
shall be kissed to forgetting.

The third stroke of falling light
tightens my grasp of love;
your lips are turned into light
and your eyes into memory-less stone,
the last restraint of lucid rupture.

The hour before the dawn is the last hour of pain.
It is also the last hour
of forgetting.