Gone in fragments

1

So where were we? With impunity
I could say together, rising and descending
like children on bread warm air in dreams

of clouds. Or reversed, like islands in the sea,
inching closer together but backwards in time
floating towards an inevitable perfection.

But was it like that? It is not known 
and you would deny it. Maybe that's why 
poetry exists.


2

Come, let's go back. Let's explore
the shores, think away the hotels,
visit the graves (strangers in a strange language)
where we took the picture, the one in which you laughed
and remain young (not us, not us, not us).

Let's go, determined and regretless
until I find the origins of the world
again folded in your lap
like a love letter.

We go to prove that we still
can casually spit the rain back 
into the sky.

We go to throw each other soggy
sandwiches on a deserted beach. Wait there and know

how I wanted to keep your face above water (your body
a diffuse presumption among the small fish) And that is
why there is poetry.


3

It was already behind us; a veil
of a thousand white stairs. The road
to the house of God on this mountain.

There I unfolded you, like a butterfly,
like the Bible. Took you in deeper than before
there on the altar. Madness under the cross, 
madness in the crotch.


4

Something became a sin, something we couldn't live with
and something became forgotten, something was accomplished, 
something became a word that grew longer. Until nothing

became our shadow in which the road got itself stuck,
so there was nothing more to look forward to
and even less to look back at. What remains

are clouds like sucked-away-fat from which rain falls
and falls. And poetry only exists because we never did.
Because this has not been written.