diagonal

There is more complicated
time unspooling in three hours than
most here are willing to admit.

Who is not surprised to
find themselves among 'most'?

But you shift in your chair
unalarmed, so I suppose
I should shift similarly.

My tongue, which I had not
often thought of as clumsy,
or indignant,
thinks out loud of your mouth,
although it -
your mouth -
pursed.

Some mysterious sentence
makes its way onto the table:
What a thing that would be:
to extend that "he" or "she"
to some pronoun more familiar
to us both.

Funny thing
that I remember the diagonal
of your eyelids
equal to
the diagonal of your hips.

from "The Last Man" by Maurice Blanchot

Oh, if it is true that we were alive together—and, really, you were
already a thought—if it is possible that these words flowing between us tell
us something that comes to us from us, at an earlier time wasn’t I always,
near you, this light, avid, insatiable desire to see you and yet, once you were
visible, to transform you further, into something more visible, to draw you,
slowly and darkly, into that point where you couldn’t any longer be anything
but seen, where your face became the nakedness of a face and your mouth
metamorphosed into a mouth? Wasn’t there a moment when you said to me:
“I have the feeling that when you die, I will become completely visible, more
visible than is possible and to the point that I won’t be able to endure it.”
Strange, strange speech. Is it now that you say this? Could it be that he is
dying at this moment? Is it you who always die in him, near him? Could it
be that he wasn’t dead enough, calm enough, strange enough, does he have
to carry desire, memory even further, is that the extremely fine and amazingly
distant point that always slips away and by which, slowly, with authority,
you draw him, you push him back into forgetfulness?

Thought, infinitesimal thought, calm thought, pain.

Later, he asked himself how he had entered the calm. He couldn’t
talk about it with himself. Only joy at feeling he was in harmony with the
words: “Later, he . . .”