Love Nocturne



He who hears nothing in this pool of shadows
I don’t know how my arms won’t wound
in your breathing I follow the anguish of your crime
and you fall in the net that sleep spreads out for you
You keep the name of your accomplice in your eyes
but I encounter your eyelids tougher than silence
and before sharing it I would kill the pleasure
of submitting you to sleep with eyes closed
I suffer sensing the joy with which your body searches
the body that defeats you more than sleep
and I share the fever of your hands
with my hands of ice
and the trembling of your temples with my lost pulse
and the cast of my muscles with the skin of yours
that shadow corrupts with incurable leprosy
Already I know which is the sex of your mouth
and what guards the avarice of your armpit
and I curse the murmur that inundates the labyrinth of your ear
over the cushion of foam
over the hard page of snow
It is not the blood that flees from me as the arrow
flees from the bow
but the rage circulating through my arteries
yellow with fire in the middle of night
and all the words in the prison of the mouth
and a thirst that in a mirror’s water
quenches its thirst with an identical thirst
Of that night I awaken to this naked
large and cruel night that is no longer night
joined with your body more dead than dead
that isn’t your body now but its hollow
because the absence of your sleep has killed death
and my cold is so great that with a new heat
it opens my eyes where the shadow is harder
and clearer and lighter than light itself
and rekindles in me what hasn’t been
and is an unexpected pain and colder and full of flame
not being but the statue that awakens
in the bedroom of a world in which everything has died.


Xavier Villaurrutia