Should This New Love Fade

Someone to follow him? I don’t think so.

It is like proposing a second heaven

as if it were attainable because you played

with angels in your childhood and believed

in the wings of their flesh.

A young girl strokes the tight braids

of her hair and thinks she is one memory.

A little eye gleams in the moonlight

hoping to be freed of its love of water, of

foggy nights, of wings, tangled

in the hair of celestial heads.

I would die again for that girl

who received everything the world suggested

as if each moment were an ascension.

But I have used up my deaths in loving him

as he died. And if this new love ends

it will have to go on in me

like a mountain behind a town

when the mountain is made to watch that town

enter flames and smoke

until it at last resembles the essence of love,

that impersonation of his heart’s heart

which, one day in the girl’s second memory,

became a little eye in moonlight

where he lived in her, imperishable

as anything offered to coexist

with the unreplaceable.