FOR ELIZA

ô toi que j’eusse aimeé, ô toi qui le savais!
(Baudelaire)


I know when you will on walk past me:
it’s sometime right after I’m warned
by the birds’ chatter, or briefly before
all sunbeams gather in a single dusty whisp,
then the glare is so strident that I simply
can’t go on sleeping.

I stand up.
My hands clean up
my ungainly rags.
You’d say I try to look my lousy best
and run to the square
where Eliza is about to pass.

I kind of love you, Eliza, though you don’t
know of me, and though I don’t
know who you are or how many.
There are so many voices and faces
wrangling and tangling in you,
that it is impossible to wield unity in it.

All I know of is that you come by rigorously
at eight and forty seven, and your name
I sort of overheard from the cafeteria waitress.
I reach you while you parade with your twisted leg,
my own copycats, raising those squinting eyes
in your medusa head, which can drive one mad.

And the buildings crane forward their petrified necks,
and windows jostle and take turns to watch you stride,
while you smoothly glide even more high-heeled
than the statue dressed in moss and patina,
which from its heights
examines the passer-by's.

I learned you work as an assistant
at the pawnshop, and since then
I’ve been living on the shadows you drop.
I can distinguish in the pitch of your breath
if you are upbeat or if the day
has burned earlier into ashes.

I can predict your humours because they flow
all along all what surrounds us, thus, if you smile,
the morning also leaps aflame, but if you whine,
the taps hush just not to compete with your crying,
and the colours all of a sudden go all shy and bleached
as though hidden behind a thick drizzly mist.

I follow you up every and each morning
for seventy-odd steps, no matter if you stumble on a pebble
or stop up in a fit of coughing. And I go on in pursuit
of your scent of ironed linen, whereas in your forehead
a crease goes on increasing,
splitting you in two:

the one who you were once,
and the one you can hardly notice.
But I adore you even so, single or multiple,
in your transit
or project
of an unknown earthly object.

But you never perceive me, Elisa,
and don’t have a clue as to what you lose
or whether there is nothing to lose...
Save that one day when you perceived on your way
my feet stamping your shade.
Then, as you turned your face

(having thought of running away,
but refraining,
having considered uttering a word,
were it not for the timid temper),
Eliza listlessly
smiled at me.