Kisses of Never and No One (IV)

What nights must have written
   your soul to make you wish
   to raise ruins over a celestial museum
   with no horizon?
Deep is the night that unmade you,
   so you could witness our end
   from below.
Beats the stroke of no one
   when no one invokes her name,
   and he draws it—of absent heart.
He doesn’t know,
   doesn’t remember
   since when he has stood
   at the center of the storm;
   or since when his hand
   no longer trembles.

He crosses the center
   and he invokes his new deity:
   No One, she.
The circle begins to close,
   though late:
   today the center is a rim
   that slips away and frees him from it.
We are ruins and kindling for his fire;
    and the threat of his yesterday
   turns inevitable:
    he is already writing
    only for her:
       Temple of Music—
       her tomorrow.

Each heartbeat opens impossible doors,
   and the Ancients do not understand
   that he is writing his tomorrow
   by the time they come to know
      they will already have gone,
      fused, into a forever—he and she—:
      a temple with a new goddess,
      bronze throat, golden bow,
      the soul of a subject in ruins.
It is not an ancient prophecy,
   it is his final fate:
   We, statues of another time:
       he is leaving us,
       we melt into one,
       into all, into nothing,
       only to survive
       his next storm.


What are we?—you asked.
And Music wrote his name:
      You, who look at us from her beyond,
      what are you?—she sang to him.
Kisses of Never and No One (IV) ·