After the Fall

If all goes well, a second sky will be born from the sea, the moment after you touch it.

When you will no longer be able to fly, you’ll have to hide in remnants of waves. You’ll find a passage in the ruin of your own reflection over the ocean.

My emaciated albatross of memories.

Facing wind that you have abdicated, you’ll find in the gate of foam, three havens of sea.

movement
expanse
depth

In clarity extensively brewed by waters, you will count off hours. All the oscillations that separate you from immobility and memory of the first shore.

You will wait longing for a time before the fall. Lulled by the sound of wavelets on your skin. Bringing fictitious light of flight to your dormant arms.

infinity of starry nights
we learned to close our eyes
eyelids like butterflies
we closed them and images came
days came
and again
we extended our wings over dry rocks
where uncountable years ago
we uttered our last cries
before sliding in a tangle of high transparency
surrounded by silence
losing sense of gravity and verticality
we were drifting
moving our wings and our adventures
no trace to immortalize our tearing
in this moment
in ocean
we flew over beds of shadows drawn by tides
we were looking for a figure
each other
someone to recognize
to offer a smile
and again eyes closed
coming images
days
and a fierce beam diffused across the landscape
through a slit on the liquid surface
our flight over fatalism caressed its gloom
and we slowed down our wings in an attempt to reach stillness
closed our eyes blind
never to see anything again
no longer to remember

Even if I am doomed to silence for the next 847 years, you will rear up out of the pool and I will try to imagine what was going on before this.

I will try to imagine how.
I once had a personal relationship to the world.

You’ll emerge long after dawn. I will be tired, miserable and funnily oblique with my crushed wings.

For you, on this morning, I will lit up the sky with stones.
For you, I will clear all gravel pits of their darkness, so that I get at least the visible imprint of your escape. Memory will become a secret of feathers. Nothing to testify elsewhere and otherwise of our life. No voice to comment our amnesia.
Our loneliness.
Our eternity.
Our love and our silence.

For you, I will unfold in a drizzle of light, as if to emphasize futility of either presence or absence. Fall inspired by the night of disappearance. Secrets that govern the kiss of sky and sea.
 
But I cannot tell you about them, you will have to wait for 847 dusty years.

Later, a grandiose bruised fire will stand reflecting the persistence of elsewhere and otherwise. And I will bend over dawns, mornings, middays, and afternoons. In twilights, we will mull an answer together.

When I will lie down on the last appropriate place, adorned with algae and pecked by birds, it will happen again, once or twice a day, that I will have the illusion of consciousness.

And I will open my eyes in surprise.

A flutter of birds will disband, afraid by this unexpected movement. They will try to fly in my deafening silence. Wings and feathers will stir the idea of sound.

Whenever I will open my eyes, multitudes will burst to the surface without penetrating my memory. It will be stopped as a cinematic still.
Forever on my retinas.

And I shall set rules of a sad game of idleness and melancholy.

A losing bet between myself and chance.

To win, I will have to capture in a single snap 554 seagulls exactly: no more, no less.

(It is a number I always loved for its musicality)

Nonetheless, it bore me no luck.

I will mutilate my gaze to make a grid with 554 facets, to assess my glance and the outcome of the game. But each time as I will open my eyes, the total number of birds will approach an ideal and harmonious value, and I will lose.

Whether during a sleepless night or after a dark limbed day, the original question will arise, and before long you will remain dazed by its alternative: “do we fly or fall?”

You will not cease singing thousands charms of your shining wings.
Your monologues will call for many heavenly creatures, as you will continue rotating and turning in an approaching crescendo.

Hoping that someone will suggest a method to continue spinning without first having to die drowning.

You will sing clear skies, and then create clouds out of your own breath.

You will smile knowingly as nothing ever prevents poetry, even when it encompasses loss of hope.

And it will push you to declare that the sky is beautiful regardless of its place in the landscape, and of your rushing out of the painting.

You’ll show all your beauty in the mire of a sub-dream.

in a trembling voice
we will wish to invite them to witness
the moment of the kiss of sky and sea
but we will bite our lips instead
our mind becoming too confused to speak in words
it will deviate spiraling above the waters
hiding access to great depthsand then
our dead wings will return to the endless sky

I will open my eyes after the fall
or is it you
and we will see birds flickering in surprise