I left a part of myself behind in Venice.

You said, “I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is — like a corpse — buried.
How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted.”

New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
in these same houses you will grow gray.
Always you will arrive in this city. To another land — do not hope —
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life here
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1910)

Krakow, Poland; perfect cafe days

Fourteen was when you started remembering–
the blue crease on convent white and Sports Day victories
at sunset; how joy tasted on your lips and the slow burn
of sun-kissed days on a red-brick track

Sisterhood watched you through the passage of
this grand dame of a horse-shoe building
wrapping you into the embrace of its
wings, stretching with the weight of students
drawn like magnets to the amber glow of lanterns, college songs
and Hokkien catchphrases

you could stay there forever,
easing the soft curves
of your body into these warm folds of memory

days undulating into this place that we named forever

I have sleepwalked through these corridors of time
turned my head back from a fragile dream

to remember that this distance is irrevocable,
pierced with the sharp pain of death
measured in fears, tears and people past

So this is how life wrangles with time;
this pulling apart at the seams, this sifting of heart strings

The Bridge of Sighs; Venice

larmoyante:

Japanese poem

I Want You When You Say No 
by Ovidia Yu

Without your otherness defining no there would be no 
wanting no having no being just a whim drift into a 
chance encounter too soon disregarded discarded by a 
not yet existent I only now called into being and saying 
no I am I am I am my want for you

(http://www.substation.org/loveletters/main.php?poem=201202)

Tea and cakes at York Vintage Fair; I do find this English way of life strangely comforting and enthralling at the same time