Cantos to Berenice

Though all our traces may be wiped clean just like candles at dawn
and you maybe can’t remember backwards, like the White Queen,
leave me your smile in the air.
Perhaps by now you’re as immense as all my dead,
with your skin night after night hiding the overflowing night of farewell:
one eye on Achernar, the other on Sirius,
your ears stuck to the deafening wall of other planets,
your vast body drowned in their boiling ablution,
in their Jordan of stars.
Maybe my head would be impossible, my voice not even a void,
my words less than tattered rags of some ridiculous language.
But leave me your smile in the air:
a gentle vibration to coat in quicksilver a sliver of the glass of
absence,
that brief vigil tattooed in live flame in a corner,
a tender sign to perforate one by one the leaves of that harsh
calendar of snow.
Leave me your smile
as some form of perpetual guardian,
Berenice.