si son siluetas.
looking out of the mirror is a boy
biting blood out of roses and kissing strangers. that is the same.
somehow, through the rise and fall
of twenty years — twenty years, and that is the same.
that has not changed, unlike everything else.
and yet the sorrow does not come. black suits stand in grey rain before white casket and upturned earth, and yet the sorrow does not come. that is the same. it has hurt more and it has hurt less, and if there is no surging, no storm-flood of memory, then there is nothing to be remembered.
it must be enough to be alone.
stars waver in thin air and an open mouth
breathes in, breathes out. no motion.
under all these city lights, a hearse
with a single white face is all that moves, soundless.
no motion before a window: but a breath, soundless,
what rises like smoke but is filled with a memory of life —
then this is enough, to be alone
and to remember the past and what lay between.
nothing between two bodies,
a hurricane of grey skin and grey words,
meaningless, kissed into the undersides of hanging jaws, no motion.
so that is what it is like to love. and should that be forgotten now, in the grey light of the morning after a body was laid under white marble? no hands, no words, no tender eyes and blue lilacs. looking out of a stranger's bedroom window, the city lights extinguish themselves, soundless.
slipping in and out of prose reduces sorrow,
prevents the gradual amalgamation of memory into loss,
of someone else's dreams into despair.
one should remember nothing of the past.
it is the dawn that matters, it is the mouth and red lipstick
that have not yet been buried.
it is easier to stop visiting: say, no more flowers.
after grief, then, what next? when bodies have left homes and taken leave of their caravans, what next? and there are no voices in the morning. and without the smell of coffee, without the smell of wood-smoke, where is home? without home, what next?
what next? (for boys with white flowers forgetting girls they met in budapest?)