To visit the past? To listen to the captive voices in the insane space of the oleanders? To restore the paradise that the autumns have broken? To return to the gardens where the lily proclaimed an immutable principle? What the hell do you intend to achieve with this folly? To proclaim the sanctuary of an enigma? To build a bridge between the shores of oblivion? To repaint the distant estuaries with the colours of that happy night, that fertile night? The night when a meteorite hit a sparkling stone that I had just caressed? The night when a gelatinous wind anointed us with its translucence? The night when you told me what happened to your eye when it took refuge in the heartbeat of a magnolia and looked at its not-look? The night when you confessed to me that the world offered to your senses could not be evoked with poetic language without your verses being exempt from leaving a residue indebted to the poetry that emerged in the period between the two wars or that which was composed while both conflicts set the world on fire, but also that which years before had illuminated some minds with infernal flowers or that which decades later would transform poetry into the main subject of the poem? Do you remember that I told you yes, and that despite that influence, perhaps the day would come when your poems would end up working, especially—I added— if you had the courage to open the doors of your poetics, and not only to the purpose of mitigating the squeaks during the fitting into their historical context, but rather as a way of ventilating your poetic places, for my taste excessively dominated by the brocade that had filigree the smell of wilted roses, the faint shadow of hollows and the roughness of sea rock, but also the pungent breath of birds, the useless glow of chalices and the cheesy fatalism of sunsets, not to mention the memory of burning robes and mystical rituals, the Orphic resonances and the transcendentalist reminiscences, the demodé philosophy that your walks among ruins and fossils inspired or the cry of the castaways who, like you, only knew how to struggle in the storms of the soul? Or have you forgotten that at the end of my enumeration, you, who at the time did not know how to read the background of my comment, said to me, a little indignant and without ceasing to observe how your double nakedness was deformed in the convex world of my pupils?
—Then what would be left of great poetry, if we were to take away the amber of the flower and the flower of memories, the perfume of lavender and the stench of peat, the gall and the honey that hold the ends of love or the stench that, dissolving in the silt, gives off the ash that was cedar before it was a ship.
I preferred not to answer you and chose to embrace the ancestral silence that announced the talk of bodies. Anyway, if I had known that night what I know now, maybe I would have said something like this:
—So what, if you end up revealing the key to our love game, the illogical mechanism of my caresses or the laws that govern the whisper that at dawn your crawling lips will chisel on the waxy skin of my/your body, of your/my body, both dead in my mind, both alive in your memory.