void alpha

I took you past the southern gate

where the roads forget their names,

through districts of reflected dust

and windows without flames.

You said the night had been arranged

by someone kind and blind;

I said the stars were not above

but something left behind.

I denied it for a while,

the geometry of loss,

the quiet proof that every door

is also still a cross.

Some loves are drawn before we live,

some maps are made of rain;

I walked the same deserted street

and never walked again.

There once was a man who dreamed a planet

and woke inside the dream;

he kept a coin, a broken watch,

a book no one had seen.

Please don’t call him fallen,

he never climbed that high;

he only found a mirror

and mistook it for the sky.

Finally found a sentence,

finally lost the page,

finally met his double

at the far end of his age.

Mostly found a doorway

standing open now.

And I denied it for a while,

the arithmetic of pain,

that one can leave a universe

and find it there again.

Some wounds are not remembered;

some names are not unknown.

I heard your voice in empty rooms

and knew it was my own.

Two things can be true:

I was never far from you,

and the maze was not a prison

but the shape the walking drew.

Past the courtyard and the roses,

past the portraits in the hall,

past the ancestors who waited

with no faces on the wall.

I know they felt the same dusk,

the same impersonal sea,

the same suspicion that the world

was dreaming them through me.

No one has to know the cause,

or where the thread began;

a tiger crossed the library,

a shadow crossed a man.

I guess you want the ending,

but endings are a lie:

the knife becomes the hand,

the hand becomes the night.

Let her cry.

Let him wait.

Let the key outlive the gate.

Let the moon revise the garden.

Let the map erase the place.

I was yours for a while,

or someone like me was.

The stars repeat themselves above

without explaining us.

I walked into the acid rain

as if it were a sign,

but all it proved was water,

and the water was not mine.

So let her lie.

Let time fold.

Let the coin return as gold.

I was in love with a mirror

that refused to grow old.

And if I sing alone now,

it is not mine alone:

some other man is singing

in some other ruined home