HOLY RETICENCE

I.

My Love’s silence spares me
The unnecessary, always unspoken
Words, gestures, marks and turns
In speech and act,
Slowing Time’s reticence …

My Love’s distance saves me
The remarkable closeness,
The melting moment’s arrest
Of hours spent motionless,
Erasing memories and Time …

My Love’s absence conquers
The embarrassment of riches,
The golden laws brought
Down to Earth, unmeasured,
Unsounded, lost, intemperate …

My Love’s eyes and coolness
Speak other worlds/times,
Addressed and undressed,
Across rivers, oceans,
Zones of indifference (Absence) …

My Love’s reticence speaks,
Volumes, tomes, acres upon
Acres of eloquent silence,
Perfect of pitch and tone,
Deaf, entombed, abandoned …

My Love’s secrets cannot harm me,
Because I do not know them …
Jealousy cannot reproach me,
Alarming beauty chooses its own
Time, place, advantage …

I see such things with eyes closed,
Ears and eyes and heart sound
Abyss upon abyss in words
Never heard, through wood
And slowly-fallen snow …

I leave My Love all time and space,
Until Time Itself erased arrives,
And paths not made in pristine snow,
Nor arcs of silver tracks unlaid,
Vanish into air(s) not there …

II.

My Love will tell little lies,
To keep me from the little truths,
But loves the Truth, the larger life,
And knows that eyes betray the same --
Astonished, rapt, and blameless …

We rarely speak of certain things,
The things one might expose en masse,
Instead we speak a long-lost tongue,
A fabled ‘langue’, a lost embrace,
Of futile figures, archaic forms …

This game is Love’s most noble past,
Repast and fast, at once and last,
A fugue of notes not written down,
And favoured fact of arts renowned,
A language lost and found …

If Art is after everything,
Chasing prey and hunting souls,
Then language is its privileged form,
That everything at last conforms,
To capture, snare, return …

My Love most loves archaic things,
The rare impress of thought unleashed,
The spare and hopeless sepulchral arts,
The tomb, the wall, the labyrinth …
All things after the Fall …

My Love resides in countries lost,
In territories never visited,
‘There’ or ‘here’, the same prevails,
Not one thing nor another,
But Everything and Nothing …

My Love unmakes and makes plans,
The same creating little holes,
Which swallow whole and bury then
The little dreams that come and go --
In time and out of time …

I care not for these things that burrow
Into Time’s most salient times,
Nor for the fact that songs not sung
Remain ahead what might turn back --
For what remains remains …

(All these things myself I love,
For if in Love I seek not-Self,
I seek as well to be undone,
To find the holy catastrophe --
Pathos and ‘Patmos’ …)

[…]

GK (DRAFT 12/16/06)

Missing Image - Caravaggio, “The Seven Works of Mercy” (c.1606), Nicola Spinosa, et alia, Caravaggio: The Final Years (Napoli: Electa, 2005), p. 107 …