XIV

In a dream, a man with almost my face stood beside me.
For a moment, the universe looked as though it knew how to repeat.
Until he spoke.
The likeness remained,
but the light was no longer coming from the same place.
Between me and everything that is to come,
a sentence heavy as a collapsed star lies there:
No one like you will ever come again.
The light of the future bends around it,
returning to me from several directions
and each time carrying a part of the familiar outline.
Once my eyes.
Twice your mouth.
Thrice a body that could be beautiful,
if beauty had a single shape.
You did not exchange my body for another.
You left it to me
and carried away its sentence.
No scar needs to shrink anymore.
The belly breathes.
The skin ages in its own time.
Nothing needs to defend itself before the light.
Perhaps that is why a face is no longer enough,
nor shoulders, nor the symmetry
that the dream maintained
until the first word broke it.
Skin is merely a place
where light changes direction.
The source remains hidden behind its shape,
too distant for the gaze to catch,
and yet real.
How many images can a single light create
before I know where it comes from?
And how many bodies must I behold
before I stop looking at their surface?
Perhaps one day a light will come
that will resemble neither you nor me.
It will form no ring.
They will not multiply in the sky.
Only beside it my body
will not have to prove anything.
Shall I know his source then?
Or will I only find out,
that for the first time no shadow remained within me?