What is this I admire? Desire which should be none?
Desire put in jars. To believe you were the one.
Only the selfless deserves love.
Now that I know how selfless you are—
(you were even then impossible to know)
coming from your office at a pace dazzlingly slow,
I glimpsed and pretended not to know
how much you intrigued me. You are thin
and haughty. Will you not let anybody in?
What resignation and arrogance
when to me you matter-of-factly opined
“only I perplex my mind,”
the ultimate statement, I thought, to keep me away:
You moved confidently, deliberately,
voraciously starved, trapped by misery, and sad
but in my memory now
I am secretly, secretly glad
to conjure in my mind your ravishment.
What do I admire? What is this desire
boiling over in the silent midnight,
contemptuous and unromantic
and yet romantic and dear?
If only you were right here!
Shadowy in my mind—full mouth, pained, lovely eyes.
What profits this desire to have infinite disguise?
Adored, elated, remote, cold, mind from afar!
Poems are endless; love and war are ignorance.