Upon The World

  
"Sì, pero quién nos curará del fuego sordo,
del fuego sin color que corre al anochecer?..."

 Julio Cortázar

               

 --When I met him, we were students, and we then had very little contact. It happened only one single day on which our eyes met. Nothing more. We never had any kind of date. Immediately transfigured after glancing me, he wrote short, interspersed verses, then pulled away abruptly, as someone who sees the possibility of something like God, and wants, needs or is forced to remain atheist. He averted his eyes from mine, as if to turn away their eyes from the bright sun of noon. Soon thereafter began, in front of my home, the building of a most exquisite bridge. In just days, and no one could understand how, it was ready - for crossing the broad avenue - a medieval Florentine style catwalk. Yes, a huge walkway with frescoes by Giotto. Architects rushed to examine it with telescopes since nobody would dare to touch or even get close to such a masterpiece. International experts pondered about taking it to a world exposition that would take place in the same Padova, where Giotto once painted so many bright expressive glances. I did not let them do it.
We lost one another, me and him. We followed separate lives, each one of us with a maze of searches, illusions, love, children, times and places. We barely knew whether the other one was still alive. Except for the blue catwalk every day there. Except by the glances of the figures of the frescoes.
I always knew it was built so I crossed it alone, no one by my side. Naked, walking to meet him, from the first night the catwalk was there. I never did it. We never met together there, both naked on a warm night - while hundreds, thousands of cars come along the avenue just before dawn - making love like cats in heat, like insects flying in copulation. No, we never met there, in spite of this being the sole purpose of this piece of art full of glances, namely, our secret meeting by dawn, as do so many lovers, so many dogs, so many beasts. We follow different and distant lives: I barely know where he might spend his afternoons and nights until the coming of the full Moon. We are born again every full Moon, as when we first saw that ours was to be the most intense desire. But only here over this magnificent bridge, where our naked selves are seen only by the figures in the frescoes, by those so beautiful eyes! He tells me that this painted woman on the left is la Beatrice di Dante, and that my eyes and hers are one and the same.
No, we couldn't keep on living just as those whose automatized lives make of them trite things, who stay adrift on Earth in a short helplessly solitary Existence. That's why, since our first moment, you and I have come from a different corner of the city, meeting together on the top of the walkway.
Under the full moon, both naked, he tenderly caresses my face and kisses me. He touches my breasts with his warm tongue and devours them. Then touches my thighs and penetrates me so tightly as the male lion penetrates his female under a tree in the savannah. Hard as a rock, thick, soft and tender, he tells me that my eyes are indeed the sun, and with the strength of the sunlight he has been able to build this bridge, where we have never been.

--- It was in broad daylight that she could be seen while crossing the catwalk for the first time. She had come in search of me. Naked, she stopped right on top where, without ever being there together, we were making love under the glances of the frescoes' characters. She seemed to be missing me. She was afraid of not finding myself anymore, since that was the first night on which she was seen alone over our huge avenue, under splendorous Moon, amidst the glittering blue of the frescoes, waiting even a single moment for my coming.

Naked, at noon, only your eyes could dare to beat the beauty of your thighs, of your hair, of your breasts, of your pussy, of your mouth, of your feet. Because of not finding me, since none of us actually have ever been there over the catwalk, you looked at those bright meaningful eyes in which Giotto represented Beatrice, and you finally understood. You saw that truest lovers are eternal, never meet, and keep fucking hard under the moonlight during the warm nights of a perpetual summer, crossing bridges over small obstacles, such as the world. This world that humans see from within their cars. And that their bodies penetrate each other, yes, so much as do the roaring lion during his heat, over a transposing bridge built by the burning of their lustful looks.

---It was, thus, under noon light, that we were now for the first time indeed, quite possessed by this same intense heat here over our catwalk built upon the world. No longer do I fear thy sight, as when I did compare them to the Sun god (which, admittedly, was a pretty poor analogy). I do not fear thy eyes. They are God.

"Nadie nos curará del fuego sordo, del fuego sin color que corre al anochecer.
Julio Cortázar, Rayuela (Hopscotch), 73


Th author of this poem also published 'The Last Owl' at Amazon. Click below to get a FREE sample: