The Aftermath of Night

Every clock will come to a halt
surrendered to different hours
in different hearts.
Sirens crying without a sea
the sea of you;
caresses like the wind,
unaware that all they touch is temporal,
as breath forgets language
and hands fade from our bodies.
You've made yourself comfortable
within the shadow of your own figure,
like someone hiding all the clocks
buried somewhere beneath the earth.
as if none of them needed the world
to pulse and let their time perish
as though they already had in you;
lilacs, lilies and magnolias,
you name them and forget their petals,
you say fragrance and forget their scent,
you say you «said» and still forget the «you».

What is a day but the aftermath
    of night and yet we call it new?
If every sunrise is irreducible,
    and we give each one its own name,
    as if it were a diary,
    if every arc of twenty-four hours is a dance,
    every month would be one day.
At night—
    we are all suspects
    for dwelling in her darkness;
    on her, senseless roads,
    and no one walking them;
    just as you, in your day,
    are the horizon you observe
    from a shore that is the night
    of the sea you wish to hunt.
I say—
I cannot become better than this
on this page or canvas that I am,
forgetting the touch,
the petals and the scent of all
that would come after them.
You—
    unable to cross the beginning
    to the end itself,
    no more than day can escape night;
    but you may write their fragments
    until they become a life.
Yet you—
    never asking why the sea
    is here, between my lines,
    and somewhere, my catastrophe
    waiting to be consumed.