SAYS  PENELOPE

 
And your absence teaches me
what art could not

Daniel Weissborc

I wasn't weaving, I wasn't knitting,
some writing I would start and erase
under the weight of the word
for perfect expression is hindered
when pain squeezes the inside self.
And though absence is the theme of my life
-absence from life -
crying comes out on the paper and the physical grief of the
body that is deprived.

I erase, I tear up, I smother
the live cries
"where are you, come, I'm waiting
this spring is not like the others"
and I start again in the morning
with new birds and white sheets
drying in the sun.
You will never be here
to water the flowers with the hose
the old ceilings dripping
heavy with rain
and my individuality
dissolved into yours
quietly, autumnlike
Your exquisite heart
- exquisite, for I chose it -
will always be elsewhere
and with words I'll keep cutting
the threads that tie me
to the very man
I long for
until Odysseus becomes a symbol of Longing
and sails the seas
in everyone's mind.
I passionately forget you
every day
so that you wash out the sins
of your smell and sweetness
and once spotlessly clean,
you enter immortality.
It is hard work and thankless.
My only reward if
I finally understand what human presence is,
what absence,
or how the self functions
within such emptiness,
such length of time,
how nothing stops tomorrow
the body keeps remaking itself
rising and falling on the bed
as though being hewn
now sick and now in love
hoping
that what it loses in touch
it gains in essence.

Translated by CHRISTINA  LAZARIDI