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I have betrayed you with my thoughts, Aylin, and with my eyes, my manner of speech, my desires but not my touch or my body. I have thought of other women after you, browsed them as I have browsed picture books. I have drawn the sea around their hair, clusters of grapes on their flesh. But remember how I used to illuminate your marginalia with Greek fantasies? Now I outline the simple patterns of Norman chapels about your memory, burying you in the interior of a demolished castle. Cold archeology will retrieve you in fragments.

I have watched other women, listened to their voices and spoke to them with the alienating cacophony of untuned pianos. And do they look back in disgust or pity? It doesn't matter and in that nonchalance I betray you most deeply.

I loved you, Aylin, as the air loves the dust, being so saturated and fortified with it. But like all figures of speech, that is a lie. For the air cannot feel and I cannot love just because of empty patterns. Why did this shadow of emptiness haunt me for so long? The years are rosaried in a decade.

I cannot betray you.


*****

These lines I have written in memoriam -


I
Morosely, I heard these words,
whose letters taste bitter,
arrange my nerves
to polyhedral blossoms,
a sound of soil and bones
making reading unbearable and exquisite.



II
I sneezed a diffraction of blood
that patterned my death
like coffee dregs
on white saucers

But the brain tarried
on this red motif
folded its effluvium
into rebirth









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