oh, so *that*'s what it is

Love is an agony and a question,
a luminous suspended doubt.
A desire to know all that is yours
and at once a fear at the end to know it.

Love is rebuilding when you are afar,
your footsteps, your silences, your words.
To attempt to follow your thought
when immobile, here at my side, you say nothing.

Love is a secret anger,
a frozen, diabolical pride.

Love is to lie sleepless when
here in my bed you dream inside embracing arms
and hating the dream in which, under your forehead,
you give away yourself in other arms.

Love is to listen atop your breast
until you have sated your covetous ear,
the murmur of blood and the seatide
of your measured and regular breathing.

Love is absorbing your juvenile sap
and joining our mouths in one river
until the breeze of your breathing
impregnates evermore my inner core.

Love is a green and silent envy,
subtle and lucid greed.

Love is provoking the sweet instant
in which my skin seeks your awakened skin--
please in one instant night's avidity
and die again the selfsame death
clawing, provisional, obscure.

Love is the ulcer's thirst
that burns without consuming or with healing
and the hunger of tormented mouths
that call for more and more, and never satisfied.

Love is an unaccustomed lust
always abandoned, voracious gluttony.

But love also is to close the eyes,
allow sleep to invade our bodies
like a river of twilight or forgetfulness,
and navigate without direction, gone adrift,
because laziness is what love is, at the end.
[Xavier Villaurrutia, 'Love Leads us to a Death', from Homesick for Death—Dead Nocturnes: The Complete Poems of Xavier Villaurrutia]