The lover doesn’t reach the beloved Except as a martyr or as a fugitive. - Mahmud Darwish

Under the dome of an aurora borealis
the beloved and the lover are frozen
into blocks of ice; this is how marine
          memory becomes a fossil.

Sun has swept the footprints from snow,
so that you can’t follow me or rescue me.
Facedown I lie in a muddy river to
         become the angel of an ice flake.

Pain all morning, pain all night
in the jawbone, behind the eye
in the ear's tunnel, at skin's border;
 	no sound, no vision, no sense, a mummy.

Winter stove fueled by burnt love letters,
a bottle of cheap wine, a carrot and an onion
on a cheap china plate, the last supper: tell Judas
	she must wait until I am well done.

Lichen on granite grows like hair on the pubis.
The beloved kneeling over my green tombstone
inscribes with her mouth this epitaph,
	“You never reached me, martyr and fugitive”

To match the night that sleeps in your eyes, I borrow words from morning light canting at the window.

I hide among trembling grass, tuberoses from the garden, and apple trees. Under these I would like to drown in the rivers

That flow through your arms, and tremble as I touch the coral of your mouth, the coal of your hair, the wind-sieved stars of your skin: revenants for which these lines are losels.

Last night I had schlepped up to St. Patrick's Cathedral on 5th Ave (and 50th St; one of New York's lovely spaces that deserves a visit if you find yourself in the area shopping etc) to get me some live music. Apparently, yesterday was the Polish Independence Day, and so the bill of fare was entirely Polish composers' vocal and orchestral music.

One of the discoveries from last night was this music by composer Wojciech Kilar, composed for a movie "The Ninth Gate". Kilar, as I learned, is also the composer of the scores for Coppola's "Dracula", and "The Portrait of a Lady" (Youtube links), apart from being a composer of religious choral music ("Angelus" was performed last night). And oh, even though, I was sitting in a awkward location, away from the central nave, the Academic Choir of Adam Mickiewicz University who did most of the singing also looked delish. Yes, we are shallow that way.

Also speaking of modern Polish composers, Henryk Górecki is another composer whose acquaintance is worth making. His Symphony No.3 "Sorrowful Songs" (listen to the second movement) ranks in the same sparse class as Avro Pärt's Fratres.