Work Text:
There is a portion of sky here that remembers your name.
In every cloud pushed forward by the ocean wind, I can see the long shadows of your face descending upon me, brushing the face of this tired old man like a cruel laugh. I hear it filling the hollows of the cliff with a sound of rage — it isn’t the tall wave arriving too fast; in the crash of its impact, I know it’s you.
When I call out to you, I’m ashamed of my own voice. I feel it scraping against the soft curves of this blue; it’s swallowed by the storm I can feel gathering: you’ve unleashed the weight of water upon me — it has always done your will — and I shut my eyes and my mouth, endure everything, and take no step.
You never knew what punishment was, but I taught you betrayal and pain. There’s a cone of air and light pressing down on my head, sinking my body into this sand-filled land.
The wind bends the plants around my weary legs. My hat still rests on my head, and when I open my eyes again, all is dark around me. The gate keys are stones in my pocket, and I am nothing but an exhausted body, full of remorse, thinking only of the embers I left in the hearth, the soup for dinner, the warm sheets for these broken bones.
There is no room left that's still clean, and the glass is too dirty to see through: I treated the lighthouse the way I treated my own body. Together we did not resist your fury — we simply stood still as you did to us everything we deserved.
It begins to rain, or maybe it’s just the saltwater you’re carrying toward me — I see you, in your majesty, commanding the ocean to devour me. Every hiss of the wind is a request you make of this coast, this place I once thought would grant me atonement, and now wants only to finish me.
When you withdraw, the edges of the rocks are revealed — the lives you took, and the ones you gave back.
But this sky remembers your name: its depth has held it in sighs and tears.
Yékoumani I called you, and I saw you in the pools of water when the tide receded — a dark and trembling face on the surface, a motion I could neither stop nor hold.
You followed me in the bushes beside the path, you ran ahead, shifting the gravel and soil beneath my steps, and I returned to the lighthouse hoping you would kill me,
hidden in some careless gesture along the road.
I knew it was you in the landslide, in the cold air in the height of summer, in the living solitude of the night.
Here the sky sometimes holds long pink streaks —they are the marks I painted on your cheeks. I dressed you in nothing but red dust, and at the end of love, your traces were everywhere on me.
I was nothing but a white ghost, and you pressed every sunset of the world onto my skin. I tried to remember, to radiate across this blue, green, and gray land the warmth you were wrapped in.
Sometimes, I glimpsed your colors above the lighthouse: the deep black of your hair, the burnt shade of your skin, and the heavy gold of your eyes.
This sky remembers your name, Yékoumani, for all the times I called out to you, feeling you above me.
And there was no one — neither you — who could hear me.