Agon without a Name

You pierced me

with a repeated force that was lighter
than what was bearable,
that felt less than paradise;
more than an imagined perception ―
sundered wholeness,
emoted affliction.

Inside my orchid flower was your truth,
your heaven that would not open.
I could not.

Those sounds of love, those sighs of love,
endless breaths of love, cascading noises of love,
resigning, removing, rising, falling...
upon the pressure of a finger
and the touch of a palm.

Words extend, they press their lips
on the pain
of an ever-growing tree branch,
curve of my neck,
and yet the leaves would not tremble,
sunlight could not devote.

I loved, and I vibrated;
I inhaled, and I exhaled,
in a way your intensification of my head
did not reveal
the flesh surrounding my heart,
and would not enter
the sculpture of me,
I could not.
A sculpture I was not.

Your fingers glided
like a starving butterfly
over my ribcage,
brushing against vertebrae of my spine,
penetrating the insides of my mind.
With the strength of ephemeral gunpowder,
like quicksilver carefully preserved
and dangerously sealed
in a glass tube.

Whose sorrowful pretence?

The subtleties and vagueness
of my self for you,
sadly it was not.
Fleeting, and yet not,
never fast.
Will never last.

Since it must be so,
no one remembered more
than what they could hope
to forget.
And what would have been my wound
when I was closest to the sun,
closest
to the reflection
of the palest moon?

The Persian Prince Humay Meeting the Chinese Princess Humayun in a Garden, circa 1450, by Junayd, Persian miniature painting on silk. © Bridgeman Art Library / Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France / Giraudon