XX. TONIGHT I AM FRIGHTENED Tonight I am frightened by what you have meant to me. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. No one every touched me so deeply or so ardently, no one ever brought their body to me so freely or so tenderly. 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.