You Who Never Arrived

(adopted from an Italian poem)

You who never arrived
in my arms, who were lost
from the start.
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me – the far off, deeply felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were
once pulsing with the life of the gods –
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a county house--, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I
chanced upon –
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and startled,
gave back
my too sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through the both of us,
yesterday, separate, in the evening.