Julia on Pandataria

On this island life sets slowly.
during long afternoons a dreary wind
beside the rustling sea, agitating
my robe with indifference,
rubs my memories, and bears witness:
Death, death, death… Death is not here.

A three-times wife, ravishing night-lover,
for whom the present was everything,
has come to this: the gull’s fluting,
a futile past and a tearful future;
an empty woman as pallid as a ghost
who lacks the blood of offerings.

And I realise in this crude place,
where the flesh rots under the dews,
strange and cold, that the whole of life
- kisses heady with perfume, wine and roses -
was always empty, and lonely…
The queen of the world was ever a corpse alone.

Most solitary when coupling, but I sought
my happiness where I but could;
under the promptings of curious desire
I sought the more, the more I found
only unhappiness in the joys of love.
I was caught time and again in the same ambushes.

That was another me – only a fable
heard once in a stranger’s dream.
What does Rome mean? Why, naked sand,
rocks, a rude-handed wind, a crying gull,
while my body withers, apathetic,
and Rome is an imagined fever.

The present no long matters. Now time
is eternal, without beginning or end,
and my young flesh because of the betrayal
and excessive hammering of fate
is ardent no longer, no longer incites to pleasure,
and death avoids me, the living-dead…