April 30, 1945

Sixteen years have walked next to us,
beseeching destiny,
and finally, the day has come.

Together
we behold liquid immortality
trembling in a little bulb of glass.
A tender bite for that eternal hunger,
the song of our finality.

Jealous fate has thwarted me twice
but not this time.
My wulf  is here to guide me into the nightfall.

That final gaze is for me,
not for cowards with armbands, not for that Magda,
but for me, Eva, your candled bride.

Foetuses yet unborn
shall one day sift through the matrices of history
and marvel at the glory of our clasp.
My death, geliebter,
shall be the monument of my love.

The idiots.

[For A.]

Held up against the eye's brimming silhouettes,
the polaroids gleam,

all those
pigtailed afternoons and tip-toed midnights,
adventures in ignorance, wisecracks at reason,
folies à deux - frenzies for every season,
precarious perches on edges, drizzly sighs,
endearing monsters and orbits in radiant skies,
diligent obsessions, winked whispers at recess,
clumsy secrets and tangerine waits for a whistle,

all those flutters of that tiny heart,
all that innocence,
all those grins.

Adulthood

Remember kindergarten, day number four,
the day life first got out of hand
and taught you to know
the futility of all,
to forget,

and yet
up against a wall
your heart wouldn't let go
until your throat tasted like sand
and you couldn't hold on to his leg anymore?

On Gerhard Richter's "Selbstportrait"

Going, going.

I nearly remembered.
(Perhaps that is how it began,
with the ordinariness of memory.)

Time is a celtic knot, debauching itself.
To believe in it is to cower in the company of shadows,
to crumble, mumble and stumble
through the unwilling curiosity of wakefulness,
to tremble beyond the tongue-tied outskirts of reason,
to gamble with absurdity and outscream silence
as it gnaws bare-knuckled at the whiteness of distance,
chipping away at the pearly expanse
until it grows weary,
dawns, secrets and passions falling away
through the years like sawdust off a chainsaw,
to reveal, one cold rainy evening,
the faint glimmer of a face that whispers wordlessly,
"I was a blue tomorrow once."