Serenade

for Seema Kirmani

You know me as the lighthousekeeper
Knows the weather, at night, on all sides.
Sometimes the summer sky is a hollow, dark
Socket and I feel as empty as my clothes
When I'm not in them. To feel fresh,
Like blood from a cut, is best, and to look
Up at the stars coming out, like tears
Coming out of a face, is also best.
Thus each of our gestures amounts
To a critique of the whole concept of action.
Not one of the spasms of sunlight
Splayed across the bed is undeserving
Of my attention. We are attached,
Painfully, to the individual histories
Of these things, which count on us,
Like children, to do right by them.

I should like to become better acquainted
With the facts of your biography, even
The uninteresting chapters where you just
Lie around all day, smoking cigarettes
And thumbing through magazines. The others,
Those in which love or lack of love
Coils your sympathies to a point of flame,
Like sun through a magnifying glass,
Consume themselves in their own intensity
And seem never to have happened.
Humans cannot bear too much unreality:
The interlude of splendor, when everything
Was on the verge of falling into place
And yielding up, at last, its superabundance
Of pleasure undiluted by pain or pain
From which no particle of pleasure was absent,
Must and should give way to afternoons
Like these, washed out as an old signature,
The negative of dazzling. The voluptuousness
Of the act is in the waiting and the not knowing
And the wanting and yet not wanting to know
The outcome and the hope that the outcome
This time will be that there will be no outcome
But that time will accommodate itself
To a kind of infinite delay in which
You are moving forward and not standing still,
Yet never approaching or catching sight of,
Through waves of distance, whatever's there.
If our dreams are unattainable, that is all
The more reason to keep on dreaming,
As there can be no question of the fully achieved
Life or the flawless consummation of anything.

And there can be no doubt that the only
Immortality is in not dying and not in what
I write or do, though I wish you could be there
Forever, listening and accepting, as though
None of it were really silly or wrongheaded,
But somehow beautiful, like the story I heard
Once of someone drifting out of a safe harbor,
Stunned by a million lights, on the Star Ferry.