Your letters still elude me. There you are— your voice, your wit, your virtuosity— all in the grace of your deft and clever hand. All your declarations and assurances, all the mundane traces of the day to day, the literary cool and the carnal heat of your craft folded up in your art. I read you and I can see your eyes. I read you and I hear you speak. You are right there, and I still can’t find you. I still don’t know where you were, or where you went.
Empires happen. Legions seize a people by their bellies and their tongues, they plant seeds in minds and skins, tromping down old ways in the name of new gods and stolen gelt. They write their triumphal histories, spreading words and misery, leaving monuments and coinage in homage to their august sovereign. They build roads and carry water, linger in conquest and dissolution, and fade into blood and memory. Cobblestones and graffiti and the mystery that absence instills.
It isn’t as if love didn’t always confound— a flower blooming from a crack in the pavement, a promise in the dark. It isn’t as if the words haven’t been spent over its grave. The lights go out, the heart is sacked, the way is suddenly perilous and thick with thieves. There are ruins, there are relics, little by little the language changes. You lost something in the translation, your gods fall in failure. I said it all and I said it wrong, another barbarian rattling your gates as you bear your standard, laurels laid upon your holy crown. History is your witness as you travel your path of exploration and conquest, as I disappear into myth. A last vestige of a mystery religion, lying vanquished beneath your boots. A poem and a prayer trodden into the earth, leaving shards and middens, a language no longer spoken in your realm.
