It means…I love you

This is what I am my love, incorrigible, hunchbacked, a sicko…still come to me, embody the night. I admit, this is what I am, denuded, displayed, debunked…still love me. Touch me, envelop me, sheath me in, blanket me warm.

I love the smell of those pages of books uncaressed for years, I love the libraries, histoire, toute la mémoire du monde; doesn’t that mean that I love you?

I love the folds beneath your eyes; I love the time that’s ticking away in the dewfall, in the snowflakes, in the sanddunes; I love the streak of those streams I have never heard; I love the night-train embarrassed of the dark; is it not loving you my love?

When I feel your warmth at my arm’s length, I whisper: “through planets to planets a timeless still web clings”. I love all unpublished poems of this world; is it not loving you?

Your breath I can smell, I murmur: “A treacherous, venomous stream runs within and runs beneath the times”, and this sickening race of silversouls speeding in the highway to reach the goldrush first and fast, and the cruel coldness of heights of indifference to this nausea: the pines can boast such a height, a man should never sport such a ignorant lyrical high. And I believe in a heart which turns its beat against such a tide. Isn’t it loving you too love?

I can touch your skin and I wet your lips: mammoth silver-bells will be ascending from the oceans one day. To hear their neverheard chimes of the awakening the coastlines of the world will be crowded by multitudes, teeming men and women with wonder of a child in their eyes! Not those silversouls who were in the race but hungry ears to hear in unison a music of liberation, and none of them are wearing sunglasses. I would love those men and women, and I love their children too. Isn’t it loving you now?

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(Should admit that the above is a very lawless transcreation of the magical final paragraphs of ‘The Last Metro’, a short story by one of Bengal’s finest modernist prose-writer Sandipan Chattopadhyay; he has novels named Hiroshima, My Love, Love in the Times of Cholera, Two or Three Things I know about Him etc; evidently, an important prose-writer well-versed in cinema and other visual arts, he was forever obsessed with Albert Camus’The Outsider and T.G. Alea’s/Edmundo Desnoes’ film/novel Memories of Underdevelopment/Memorias del Subdesarollo…though he never mentioned the latter ever; but I can’t help not seeing the shadow of that film in each of his prose-pieces, almost)