Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Sweet ghost, why do you visit me
as in other times our bodies visited each other?
Your transparency dampens my skin
coming together in caresses that can never happen
no one ever received a kiss from a vanished face.

But you insist, sweetness. I hear your voice,
the same voice, the same tone,
the same light syllables
and the same deep breath of longing
with which you dissolved in pleasure.

And our final rest from love,
then I am convinced, that I hear your name,
the only part of you that hasn't dissolved
and that continues existing, pure sound.
I embrace what?
The mass of air you have turned into.
And I kiss, I kiss the nothingness intensely.
My beloved destroyed being, why do you return
and are you as real as you are illusory?

I no longer can tell if you are a shadow
or if you always were a shadow, and our story
is fiction in a painfully deciphered book.
Will I one day know your real body
as today I know how
to embrace the mist as one embraces
a platonic ideal in space?
Does desire endure for you who no longer are
dear absent one, to persecute me gently?
I never thought that the dead
would have the same passion as in past days
and that they could transmit it to us with kisses
of blazing fire and multi-colored ice.

Your burning visit consoles me
Your burning visit desolates me
Your visit, hardly a pittance of charity.