Remembrance

"... Here, take this, O you forbidden to me —
that some song in your name may reach you"

However many secrets I hide within myself
and flee from remembrance,
lest her nights come across my mind
and I fall to thinking of her —
and however much I wring my mind and heart,
it finds no cure, and I do not repent.
Enough! One girl I cast off, and another I cast off,
and I forget them... and there she is,
still keeping her tryst with me in dream.
Oh, how often I have embraced the illusion —
and oh, the sweetness of her innocence —
Hawi! and though I left her — alas!
And in the emptiness of my heart, in the loneliness of its nights,
I call upon your remembrance:
if only there were some blaze to set the breast aglow —
a blaze! and there it is, a whole lifetime.
Your love quivers within it, and there wake
the wounds of a deep secret:

***

You were mine, and you would dream of me —
oh, your tenderness toward me!
You were mine — with no arm wound about a waist,
no trembling of breast on breast;
I took my fill from your love of tenderness and fire
in two short nights:
as much as the life we lived together, I remember,
and as much as it gave me — all of it, and more.