Those years! When she was young!
Looking back at them now feeds this poem
for emotional reasons alone. Those years
were neither literary nor amazing.
I cannot make them so. I was clumsy in love, then,
and today I’m similar in my contemplation.
I cannot pretend those years were poetry or she,
who burned through those years, is poetry.
Beautiful youth burns through the page.
Poetry is only possible when we age.
My mind is cooler, now, that’s true,
but she, my reader, (how can I say this?) isn’t you.
She still burns through me—
even in my memory.
I cannot make others see
how she overwhelms, how she frightens me.
My poem’s failure is the best sign,
absent of details, absent of anything sublime,
of the grip she has on my mind.
In those years, which I think on now,
the light left her face and burrowed in my eye
causing a conflagration in my brain
which wrecked my eye like the one which stared
from the face of Cain
who struggled to be calm in vain.
Be sure there was nothing
remarkable in what she did.
Common remarks were made. Genius hid
inside what (happy or sad) she said or did.
Add this to the fact that what is ordinary and common
is the secret to what is artistic and true,
the same small group of notes, the frame which shows us
what we always knew. She betrayed me into praise.
Who she tried to be couldn’t help me with my poetry.
In that respect, I was alone.
Poetry burned when I touched her.
It was impossible for poetry to live when I came near.
This poem is only an attempt to show this is true.
And it succeeds! She succeeds!
Because, my reader, she isn’t you.