To the veiled one: an ode

You left a promise under my doorstep

To remain urbane under the white walls and white ceilings of distant

Seas I shall not know; handwritten in the creamcoloured paper you have in

Reams; intimate; pleading; yet I would rather believe the adage

From a fortune cookie from a London

Coffeehouse I went to last summer—

‘What is trivial is true is beautiful’—

Which does not pretend to care.

The blue ink would not

Hinder the catharsis of so many

Long nights, so many withered flowers

Protruding from the desperate floral foam which I do not even wish to see again.

Damp the stalks, more alive than the leaves now crumbling the petals now turned to dust

While in my bedroom the telephone rings eternally,

And the lights will never go out.

From the peeping hole I see your face

Urbane even among the pirates of white rooms in

Houses with Dutch doors and brass gramophones,

Whose windows would not open to the world but only for each other:

To a chamber, wider, with walls farther than sight and

Ceilings unreachable even by the giants of yore.

I will hug this whiteness and I shall be one with it.

Then, too, I shall still not believe what you wrote in the

Beige postcards you send me in sun and snow.

I got tired of you telling me how you spent evenings

Bathing in Saint-Saëns sheepishly afraid

Anyone would hear what happened to the plebeian who

Interpreted dreams: in the morning, filling the regal bathtub with

Coffee; donning afterwards a minister's regalia,

Adviser to the King, while the face is a pauper's, caffeinated;

In the afternoon pushing carts by the

Quayside, peddling; at sunset, touching oneself, then reading under a lamp

Of unhealthy wattage.

Life was spread ad valorem to those who were

Insignificant enough to attend its colloquiums

And the sad ones were not there, and also the blind.

I too danced in decadence, a young marauder sadistic as a

Child, lost, lingering, in the sweaty Arabic

Afternoons of Toledo, kissing the dead man

Avuncular, on his lips a painted smile of surrender to

Putrefaction. But never unhappiness;

Never the torment of unanswered phone calls,

Of messages unread a month hence while the doubt

Unhinges me whether you are where you say you are.

Or is it the white rooms (curtainless for here no

Dawns), is it the metallic bedframes, the stainless white tiles of your floor that is

Unsettling; unsettling as sexless young children or your sootfree skin and my grimy hand.

I have become your disciple. To you now I appeal.

Scandalised by my own nudity,

Afraid of mirrors,

My only comfort is

Your face under a sunflower's perfect shadow,

Beardless as the passive night (as potent , yes, but as

Ephemeral as the bitter aftertaste of refrigerated pineapples):

I have abandoned my

Virility to take hold of the passing hour—

Agile; unaggressive; eyes looking for wonders,

Watching for signs from ghosts under a halide lamp.