PJ Harvey & Sadalmelik

 

The phoenix transforms each of us into different skins. For you, I have died and risen again, for you, I have collected honey, without ever having been a beekeeper.

For you, I have been a bee and a flower, a rock and a hunting animal, I have been your home, and today, with all this distance, which no distance can nullify, which no barrier can hold back love, I am only this nectar that rises from my glottis to tell you about love, you who are still soul, spirit, mind and strategist, and tenderness and candor, and love and surrender, you are everything to me, once again, since the beginning of everything, of what I feel, of what you make me feel, of what remained and grew, of what is impossible to describe, of this beginning and end and middle and I stumble upon you entirely, without embarrassment, and many will say "nonsense", but what do they know of love that you have not taught me, that you have not drawn in the furrows of the skin of my youth as a woman, which were engraved in posterity, your fingers, your hands, in my fears and in my passion, hidden from me for decades, hidden to preserve me, I know it now, but if I do not tell you, Who will tell you, I who recognize you and who transformed myself for you, from a sea wave I climbed your back and became a tsunami, of breaking into sobs of longing, without any effort, a common stone kicked on the dirt road, a valley, a mountain, a hill framing the apples of your cheeks, of loving you like a beggar who asks for bread and to whom you gave everything, and I need to unveil, tell you, I need to talk to you, I need you to accompany the process of death, this of transforming me into another substance, something other than a woman, so that I can peek at your face, to see you smile and be able to faint in your scent, to fill myself with desire and for decades, centuries and millennia preserve you more than the outline to which time has reduced you, that you are all love, you are all the splendor of life, of sap that gave me shelter and only your name, what power, my god, your name sows in me fields of wheat and barley, sows in me moments of idleness and so many nights of hoeing, without resting, without truly contemplating your body, that in me remained the party and the commotion, that you sowed, that you left in me the song, the laughter and the fountain to quench my thirst, you left the sea and the mountain, you became a rock, you became a garden in the moonlight, in the star that you became, love, I repeat your name, as many times as I need you, I attribute contours to your still profile, and I blur the image of the photograph, returning to eighty-four, to ninety-seven, I remain restless, agitated, in love, but what moves me is you, and I draw your lips in the imprecision of my closed eyes and I cover your eyelids with silk kisses, and I go down to your earlobe, to the smile that I draw on you sideways, and I inhale the scent of your neck, and I take off your coat and any other obstacle, any piece, and I shiver as I imagine your body, which only with my eyes closed do I see moving, embracing my shoulders, my arms, finding in the flames, in the flames of my restlessness, finally, the port with the name of adornment where I undress, Faustino, and I mount you and being one with you, I am part of the outline of the future, which you say is already past, where you decided to remain, in the infinity of the scream that I have silenced, the emperor of love. My love for you is still that of a person, of flesh and bone, an urgent thought of human conscience, how kind you came to be, scientist, magician, shepherd, beekeeper of my eternal landscape, because you came to be my home and I enter you barefoot, I surround your hips, I sit down and in my joy, in this contentment of mine, in this fantasy of making you eternal, I preserve your warm and clear gaze, I preserve your energy around angels, and I feel the breath of God that is everywhere, inside and outside of who you came to be. I close myself off for the night, with wet eyes and it is not pain, but longing, it is not anger, but rather the understanding that for you I was accidental, a mere mortal and that only in God am I a sacrament to you. And I return to being the house where you rest when you are alone, when you abandon yourself to the thought of me, where you sowed the garden with a lake, with a mother and a son in the center, in homage to life and you see me filling the tides, being lost. But here I am again, overcome by the memory of being dear to you, once more, in this stroke of wings, where Phoenix, I disintegrate into ashes and in the breeze of the wind, I kiss all the ground where you glide and settle, in the sky, in the firmament and build yourself into a constellation. And from time, the stories that led us here, learning about love and the urgent vicissitudes of life, are released, and yet, if I was silent, I will be silent no longer, if I hid, I have revealed to you, needing the faithful witness of the paper on which I write to you, that to love is to silence the shells and transform penances and crosses into their controversial antonym. You are my home and I am your home, and I was anointed by God and you, without wound or stain, fortunate and happy. And I still have your name associated with who I am and I will sing to you until the end of time, until I myself become wind and you sadalmelik.