XX.
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TONIGHT I AM FRIGHTENED
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Tonight I am frightened
by what you have meant to me.
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I know you'll marry your heart
to the man I stole your kisses from,
you'll marry him in the world
and our souls will go on yearning.
Isabella, how do the angels make love?
I feel as though they've borrowed our bodies,
two angels who were desirous of one another
for countless insubstantial centuries;
we gave them a habitation,
allowed them a way to touch.
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And now we return to the flesh of days,
and I wonder
if you are the last fine moment in my life,
my dark and final lover.
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You lifted me up into the air
where the angels wanted to be,
where our hearts wanted to go,
where the startled birds were flying
and passion was a dark magnificent bird.
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Through nights like this
I held you in my arms;
now darkness is a bottomless well
and the stars are circling like birds of prey.
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You burnished me with fire,
the fire in your eyes, and smaller fires
built everywhere about your body.
I sought them out and drowned myself in them.
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I jumped through the mystery of you
and found myself
on the other side of your eyes.
I let your ardour and passion
make a conquest of me,
I let myself be the one
who is poured into.
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We crossed every boundary
of space and time,
and you are the one I want
always above me,
always beneath me,
always in the mercurial glass
of every erotic mirror I peer into.
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You are lost to me
again and again,
and you can never be lost
because you are fused to my blood,
are the beautiful twin of my longing.
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No one every touched me
so deeply or so ardently,
no one ever brought their body to me
so freely or so tenderly.
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In your arms I have lived
a hundred lifetimes, a thousand nights;
tonight I am frightened
by what you have meant to me,
and I am deeply satisfied.
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