Requiem for a Girl

I thought I was. I was sifting through my ashes
as if making out the nuances of passion in relation
to your sweetness and bitterness, girl. Every
day, every night, without giving it a thought to help me.
Do you remember; when I want, in the middle of the night,
persecuted, to reach into the poured blood; then as if the path was
falling into the tomb: something is always already lost. Time flies
on the paths that doubt does not reach, and to be on them
is like being on them. Do you remember, when we played two children, no bigger than the thumb of a hand, when we, bogged in mud, played lunch like two slender birch trees neighing merrily,
when we played like two little elves, so fleet-footed, so wise,
so crazy. Entranced, I studied, little and serious, to be happy.
My pains were the buckles I tore off my clothes. I said and still say: ridiculous are the scores and ridiculous are the laws, useless
for the body’s spirit to wrap itself in them: cast off the gossamer from your body and wrap it in your loveliness. The play as a story about no-one. Birth as the human soul. Suffering as the springhead of beliefs. Madness as the yearning stone. Your hand stopped even before you drank up. Someone saw: eyelashes are sticky, smoke makes them stick, the girl trembles, there she is, like a butterfly’s wings in the rain. Someone said: even before the curtain went up
on a thousand and one nights, she said: You are not. Someone sensed: may a hyena pounce on my black bones, may the volutes salivate over my outspread loneliness, if I say anything. Someone knew: she is alone Come, girl and be gentle
with her.