Lie still now while I prepare for my future, certain hard days ahead, when I'll need what I know so clearly this moment.
I am making use of the one thing I learned of all the things my father tried to teach me: the art of memory.
I am letting this room and everything in it stand for my ideas about love and its difficulties.
I'll let your love-cries, those spacious notes of a moment ago, stand for distance.
Your scent, that scent of spice and a wound, I'll let stand for mystery.
Your sunken belly is the daily cup of milk I drank as a boy before morning prayer.
The sun on the face of the wall is God, the face I can't see, my soul,
and so on, each thing standing for a separate idea, and those ideas forming the constellation of my greater idea. And one day, when I need to tell myself something intelligent about love,
I'll close my eyes and recall this room and everything in it: My body is estrangement. This desire, perfection. Your closed eyes my extinction. Now I've forgotten my idea. The book on the windowsill, riffled by wind... the even-numbered pages are the past, the odd- numbered pages, the future. The sun is God, your body is milk...
useless, useless... your cries are song, my body's not me... no good... my idea has evaporated...your hair is time, your thighs are song... it had something to do with death...it had something to do with love.
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