Starry Night

On a late winter night, the lovers find themselves in a country field, among the mobile stations of an astronomical observation: infrared lights that leave the dark untouched, so the gaze can rise to the sky. But the movement of the poem runs the other way, and everything turns on this: the ones invited to look are the stars. They are the ones who must lean down toward the two lovers, watching them, astonished, as they cross "the fallow field of the flowers of night." From here it becomes clear why every verb is in the future. The light of that scene will have to travel for years before reaching them up there; the true encounter between the lovers and their witnesses will happen long from now, when of those two, perhaps, nothing will remain.

The two are young, and carry a passion they cannot contain: to master one's instincts and to fail are the same thing, "wretchedly." They love each other, they dream, they warm one another in the dark, and the kisses, in the dark, become "dense": it is the absence of sight that gives bodies back their full weight. And yet within this fullness a fissure already vibrates. The silence of the night grows so loud because it holds together things that would not stand together in words: joy and a thin fear, the foreboding of something that will go wrong. The "icy wind" they ask to be held against is not February's cold: it is the intuition that this time will end, and end soon.

Perhaps this is why the final surge takes on a surreal tone, almost an act of defiance. The run across the plain becomes flight; the crows fall silent, the satellites drop dumbstruck. What caws and what calculates (indifferent nature and the technology that measures) both pause before an intensity that exceeds them. It is not omnipotence: it is the exact moment in which two lives burn at the peak of their temperature, and it is that moment the poem wants to take care of. The closing invocation says it openly: "we will inscribe the instant / in which our coordinates / will cross." A datum fixed in the register of the sky, so that the stars may one day verify it.

The relationship, on a cosmic scale, will have lasted less than a heartbeat. But at that precise point, at those coordinates, the two will have been there: lost, in a world too large for them, and yet, at least for a moment, lost together.