Sabina

Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein!


I

When I called the other day
you, addressed me so casually
I became restive-
and abandoned what I had
originally intended to say.

That the night before
I’d dreamt of you.
Dreamt that we were lovers
again.
But always there was, lingering,
a sense of apprehension. A feeling

That if anyone knew, the world
would come undone like
Disintegration.

So each time I leaned in
to bite your neck and cup your
breast beneath your shirt,
I did so with a great nervous
Hesitance.

And we kept arriving
to the same airport
to the same gate
over and
over
Each time the plane flying
closer to the terminal before
Landing.

Till finally, the plane was gone,
it was only you and me, flying
through the airport ceiling
at that maddening speed-

And we both knew we would die.

I’d called because I wanted to
tell you how you laughed rabidly
when we discovered even our seats
were gone, and it was just you

And I hung, like marionettes
in the sky, our bodies
fixed in the shape of Osirin
Hieroglyphs…

But I lost my nerve, and instead
spoke at too great a length of
unimportant things, as
I am prone to do
when forced to improvise.


II

In these ruins, carved out
of my knowledge of you,
I have given you a name:

Sabina. A pale nymph
in a black bra and panties
with a bowler perched atop
your head.

(though in my mind she
always wears matching
thigh-highs)

I have given you
this name
as the earth is given the sun-
as something unasked for,
nor rendered gently upon it.

You have always been
the most talented of
All women
at giving and receiving,
you claim I taught you this;
though I’ve never understood how.

But even in this name-
Which I feel well suits you,
despite your proclivity
towards the French,
There is a lie.
Not for any belief that the
character which lends it
does not well encompass you.

It is Tomas, so absorbed
in his efforts to emasculate love-
to castrate its sexuality,

Who fails to realize his love of Sabina.
Its synchronicity
with that of the infant Teresa;

Whom he plucked from
The riverbanks of his bed.
With her heavy suitcase
The life she offered,
blindly knowing by fortuity
he would take it, willingly…

Yet at night, when he could not sleep,
as the restless serpent of the mind
lay coiled hours long,
round the ‘idea of love’
the face which stalked his corporeal
memory, regardless
of how easily it could be perceived,

Had the blurred features of a double
exposure.


III

The best picture I have of you
resides in my copy of
The Selected Poems of Dylan Thomas
-I could draw a line through serendipity-

I’m sure you would be happier
in my bi-lingual edition of
Les Fleurs du mal

- Nous mettrons notre orgueil à chanter ses louanges;
Rien ne vaut la douceur de son autorité;
Sa chair spirituelle a le parfum des Anges,
Et son œil nous revêt d'un habit de clarté.

But for some unforeseeable reason,
I do not move you there.

I don’t read Thomas often
anymore, so when I do
I am always pleasantly surprised
To find you.

Your pail skin, Your white dress
almost dissolved into a background
which is so out of focus,
it is little more than a cloud
Of verging shades of azure.


IV

I have barrowed a verse
from Baudelaire
to define you.

A name from Kundera
to describe you give
you a face in this memory.

I do not know
how to defend all of this.
Our love, my love of you
-we do not show it to ‘the others’-

But that it burns day long
and casts a milky
reflection upon the surface
of the night.