— Adam Donaldson Powell
The Triangle of memory
In a drawing room where shadows cling to the curtains,
Marcel smiles like a motionless strategist.
He knows the heart does not surrender to words,
But to the keen bite of a skillfully wielded silence.
Two young stars revolve within his sky:
One is granted a glance, the other laments its absence.
A hand comes to rest—almost nothing, almost a plea—
And already the air grows heavy with hidden violence.
“Love,” he murmurs, “is never born of rest;
It seeks its own reflection in a troubled soul.
What we believe lost becomes all the more precious,
And absence itself devises its conquest.”
Then he grants one a fleeting gleam of favor,
Not to prefer him, but to unsettle the other.
Every smile bestowed becomes a sharpened spur,
Every détour another thread tightening the knot.
The other, consumed by a fire he could not yet name,
Discovers desire only through suffering.
Jealousy fashions an invisible dawn,
Where longing is the ink and every gaze an abyss.
Marcel watches solemnly this inward theater:
He possesses nothing except by awakening fear.
He reigns less through embrace than through expectation,
Less through presence than through a carefully feigned absence.
For in Proust, love is no obedient flower:
It blooms in the shadows where doubt keeps watch.
Jealousy waters it with an almost delicate stream,
And the heart becomes the jailer of its own preservation.
Thus the third is often nothing more than a mirror,
A stolen glimmer meant to set the sleepless nights ablaze;
And the one they wished to leave untouched begins to believe
That all destiny depends upon these fragile wonders.
Within the chamber of time, where memory keeps its vigil,
Passions are woven from loss and hope alike.
Love is never born there from perfect peace,
But from a name one fears never to behold again.
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