Recollections of the Prince of the Autumn Leaves

I returned to the past to come get you; to bring you back with me, back to me.

I walked the way beyond time and beyond the gravity that exists further out, that keeps it all moving forward and round and round.

I never knew the universe was alive before I walked outside of it. I watch it skipping as I walk by, flashing back and forth between its own memories. It’s trying to remember what happened and what didn’t.

I am coming for you.

I am going to make it forget you died.

Let it choose the false memory where you are still alive. It would look for who remembered it right and when it finds me, I will do it all over again.

We are watching a couple fight. They are married. They know one another better than us.

You hold my hand

you hold it tight.

That will not be us.

I say.

I know what this place is;

that is what will keep us together in here.

I kiss his hand

and he kisses mine.

No,

I’m remembering it wrong.

I kiss your knee;

You kiss mine.

Now,

I look to the future

I am writing the Prince of the Autumn Leaves

and he is walking through his garden;

That garden which was their Eden before death came into our world.

___________________________

And in his eyes, he counted the steps. He felt the shape of the memory like it was her body, but now the memory was watery and he cried because he couldn't remember. He couldn't remember her face.

And somehow she was growing vague. And a thought came into his head, that was terrible.

'Did death eat her? Can I not remember her and these parts of her, her face, that way she moved her arms, because death has eaten away those parts of her body? When he is finished eating her, I will forget her?

'In the end, in my memories, will she become only a skeleton? With some rotting hair? Cruel looking and without mind to it or care that she has changed? (In my eyes)

'In my eyes,' he thought, 'she could change, but my heart could never!'

But he was wrong, it is our own death which is there with us all along that slowly eats our memories as it rots us. And his heart changed as he, too, died a little more. Inside and outside.

Leaf Dark Grove

In the prince's love

This is where he had met the princess

Beneath the shapes of shade, worn like the veil of death she had worn at their last parting, when they buried her in the crypt Her eyes had shown like the bark had come to life in the rain, in a sun shower, shining like the dew that dripped from the leaves, deep green as the leaves dripping in their watercolor; full and wet with heavy rain—

He cried; he could not remember the color of her eyes anymore.

He had walked down the path of that memory too many times. He had trod all over it with his dirty shoes, with the rough heels of his boots and muddied it, muddied his love irreparably.

From the balcony of the manor,

His eyes walked the garden maze, every verdant, evergreen memory of their love until his soul grew tired

grew old,

at the sight of the clover tree, where upon arriving,

his eyelids sat down and had a rest reminiscing of rain and of the two of them beneath it

He walked to the gallery where a portrait of her hung, his head hung in his hand, like a convict in the gallows, such shame as he felt before that portrait as any before God or love because life and death and love had dirtied them. He could not remember anymore. He had forgotten love.

They were gray, they were overcast. Had the artist ever truly captured them? When they were everything and they held everything.

___________________________

I don’t know where to go from here;

because as the Prince of Autumn,

I do not remember you.

I lost you.

And I pushed the sadness so far down

That memory drown.

Mais temps en temps,

Les fleurs sont trop grandes

pour le printemps.

Il parte

mais

il est une partie de moi,

comme un pétale que dit

Je t’aime.

That is what too much rain really brings.

The death of flowers,

cut and put over your chest

where my head once laid.

And your soul goes to Heaven, but in my grief,

I only see the smoke disappear into the sky;

to go I know not where.

I whisper silence because I can’t say your name anymore.

In winter, when I speak it, the cloud that blooms screams it as loud as thunder

Can you hear my heart’s heavy boom?

Can I not fly to you

because I am weighed down,

tied to this earth, with such heavy sadness?

Is there no answer from you in Heaven

or can I not hear you because you’re holding your hands over my ears to keep them from turning red in bitter cold?

I am waiting for you.

I shake myself out of such fantastical reveries.

That poem is already a future past

that I have walked through to get closer to you

I am filled with anticipation the closer I get to where you live.

Where was I now?

How much further back do I have to walk before I reach you?

Will it be a happy ending

just to see you again?

I am passing “The Red Rose Knight”, “Tannhaüser”, and the “The Ostrich”,

You’re nowhere near me still.

I am walking by thousands of poems I wrote about you,

then the funny stories I wrote in college.

I am getting closer to you now.

The stories we told one another. There you are most clearly in my memory.

I have you now.

A man is holding me who is not you,

doing so many things you did.

I don’t know why you come to mind now after all these years.

I mean this really beyond all fiction; every time I kiss him, I’m thinking of you.

He says soft words to draw me out of my shell.

He buys me sweet things that swell the glutton in my belly,

But

when he and I kiss one another goodbye,

my eyes drift to the floor or the ceiling

and I think of you.

I want them to be your large hands and your sweet words on my tongue.