To love you or not to love you-
I go away, leaving behind me addresses susceptible to loss and wait for those who will return; they know the visiting hours of my death, so they come.
You are the one I don't love when I love you. The walls of Babylon shrink in the day; your eyes enlarge; and your face incandesces in the glare.
One would think you were not born yet; we had not been separated before; you had not felled me.
On the terraces of the storm every word is beautiful; every meeting a farewell.
Nothing between us except this encounter; nothing except this farewell.
To love you, or not to love you-
My forehead flees from me; I sense that you are nothing or everything; that you are susceptible to loss.
To want you, or not to want you-
The murmer of streams sears in my blood. The day I see you
I go away.
I tried to recover the friendship of lost things-
Done!
I tried to boast of eyes capable of containing every fall-
Tried to carve around your waste a name suitable for an olive but it begot a star.
I want you when I say I don't want you.
My face falls.
A distant river dissolves my body. And in the marketplace they sell my blood like canned soup.

I want you when I say I want you-
Woman who has placed the shores of the Mediterranean in her lap, the gardens of Asia on her shoulders, and all the chains in her heart.
To want you, or not to want you-
The murmer of streams, the rustle of pines, the surge of oceans, and the feathers of nightingales all sear in my blood.
The day I see you, I go away.
To sing you, or not to sing you-
I hush. I cry. There is no special time for crying or hushing. You are my sole crying.
You are my single silence.
My skin constricts around my throat; under my window the wind marches in uniform; darkness waxes without warning.
When the soldiers abandon the palms of my hands
I will write something.
When the soldiers desert my feet
I will walk a little.
When the soldiers relinquish my vision
I will see you and discover myself again.
To sing you, or not to sing you
You are the sole song; you sing me if I hush.
You are the only silence.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond any experience,your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose or if your wish be to close me,i and my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly, as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

TRANSLATED BY MARK EISNER
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself, and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love, except in this form in which I am not nor are you, so close that your hand upon my chest is mine, so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

I laid an atlas out in front of you and said “pick a city.”
You smiled at me and the ink bled into your hands where you touched it.
What I didn’t say was, pick a city where I can hold those hands.
Where we can walk the streets and people will only stare because your fingers are the land and mine are the sea and they’re finally coming together.
Where people won’t look twice, simply because you are a girl and I am a girl and didn’t
Aristophanes once say that humans are two halves of a whole?
No one should call us wrong for being brave enough to let our hearts wander and return to a person who feels like home.

the day before the war i woke to your face pressed against mine, the whole sky weighing down on us, cracked open like the bark of a walnut this is what i said to your opiate face, the sharp dark of your hair, the tremors that came
& went like a thousand disasters on the far away planet of your body - i am tired of the sea side saw mill of your love, ricochet romance, every fragment, every shrapnel shell, all the broken birds outside our window of the way you stir in your sleep; lightly, lightly, how my heart swings open on rusty hinges i am bad at not wanting you always, another thing i said while you slept, the

old sun creeping onto the bed, swelling & sick from devotion also this: your eyes falling open, the bastion or siren, every old sore or wound blooming open, the whole fine day between us & blood shed, your smile which never comes