What torments me most about loving you

What torments me most about loving you
-1-
What torments me most about loving you...
is that I cannot love you more...
And what bothers me most about my five senses...
is that they remain five... no more...
An exceptional woman like you
needs exceptional feelings...
exceptional desires...
and exceptional tears...
and a fourth religion...
with its own teachings, rituals, melody, and fire.
An exceptional woman like you...
needs books written just for her...
and sadness that is hers alone...
and death in millions of rooms...
In which she lives alone...
But alas...
I cannot mould seconds
Into rings to place on your fingers.
The year is governed by its months,
The months are governed by their weeks,
The weeks are governed by their days,
And my days are governed by the succession of night and day
In your violet eyes...
-2-
What torments me most about language is that it is not enough for you.
What bothers me most about writing is that it does not write you.
You are a difficult woman.
You are a woman who does not write.
My words pant like horses on your heights.
My vocabulary is not enough to traverse your light-years.
With you, there is no problem...
My problem is with the alphabet...
With twenty-eight letters, I cannot cover a single inch of your femininity...
Nor can I offer a single prayer of thanks for your beautiful face...
What saddens me in my relationship with you...
Is that you are a multifaceted woman...
And language is singular...
So what do you suggest I do?
To reconcile myself with my language...
And remove this estrangement...
Between the porcelain and my fingers...
Between your polished surfaces...
And my fingers buried in the snow...
Between the circumference of your waist...
And my ambition...
To discover the sphericity of the earth...
-3-
Perhaps you were satisfied with me...
Because I made you like princesses in children's books
And painted you like angels on church ceilings...
But I am not satisfied with myself...
I could have painted you better
But time surprised me
And I am suspended between copper... and milk...
between drowsiness and the sea...
between the nails of lust and the flesh of mirrors...
between curved lines and straight lines.
Perhaps you were satisfied, like all women,
with any love poem written about you...
But I am not satisfied with your convictions...
There are hundreds of words asking to meet me...
And I do not meet them...
And there are hundreds of poems...
Sitting for hours in the waiting room...
So I apologise to them...
I am not looking for a poem...
For a woman...
But I am looking for "your poem"... You...
-4-
I blame my body...
Because it could not wear you better...
And I blame my skin pores...
Because they could not wear you better...
And I blame my mouth...
Because it did not pick up the pearls scattered along your shores better...
And I blame my imagination... .
Because it couldn't imagine how lightning and rainbows could burst forth...
From your breasts, which didn't celebrate their eighteenth birthday...
Officially...
But... what good is blame now...
After our relationship became a pale orange,
It fell into the sea...
Your body was full of the possibility of rain...
And the seismograph
Under your round belly, like a child's mouth...
Predicted the shaking of the earth...
And gave signs of the Day of Judgement...
But I was not smart enough...
To pick up on your signals...
And I was not cultured enough...
To read the thoughts of the waves and the foam...
And hear the rhythm of your blood circulation...
-5-
What torments me most in my history with you...
Is that I treated you like the philosopher Heidegger...
And did not treat you like Rimbaud... Zorba...
Van Gogh, Dick the Genie, and other madmen.
I treated you like a university professor...
Afraid to love his beautiful student...
Lest he lose his academic honour...
That is why I feel an overwhelming desire to apologise to you...
For all the mystical poetry I recited to you...
When you used to come to me...
Full as an ear of corn...
And fresh as a fish out of the sea...
-6-
I apologise to you...
On behalf of Ibn al-Farid, Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, and Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi...
For all the theories... And fantasies... And symbols... and masks
that I used to put on my face in the chamber of love...
When I was required
to be as sharp as a blade
and as aggressive as an African cheetah...
I feel the urge to apologise to you
for my unparalleled absence
and my unparalleled cowardice
and for all the proverbs
that I memorised by heart
and recited on your small breasts,
so that you cried like two punished children and went to sleep without dinner.
-7-
I confess to you, my lady,
that you were an exceptional woman
and that my absence was exceptional.
So allow me to recite before you my remorse
for all the wise words that came out of my mouth...
For it became clear to me...
after I lost the race...
and lost my money...
and my horses...
that wisdom is the worst dish we can serve...
to a woman we love...