TRANSLATING THE END OF LIFE TO EROS

Since I can’t touch you

with my tongue

I transliterate my passion.

I can’t take you as communion

and I denature you

I can’t undress you

and I dress you with imagination

of an allophone language.

I can’t cuddle under your wings

and I fly around you turning

the pages of your vocabulary. 

I want to know how you denude

yourself, how you are reborn

and for this I search for

your habits between your lines

the fruits you love

the smells you prefer

the girls you read as if turning pages.

I’ll never see your nude signs

so I work hard on your adjectives

that I recite them in an allophone language.

Yet my story became too old

my tome doesn’t adorn any shelf

and now I imagine you leather-bound

in a foreigner’s bookcase.

Since it was never allowed

to let myself in the nonsense of nostalgia

and write this poem, I read

the gray sky in a sunlit translation.

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