I would like to rent a room where
names of past lovers can be carefully erased,
like mistakes in a schoolchild’s homework.
They have become like a white stain,
a circumscribed fragment of the void
going up the spiral staircase to
the prologue of closed books,
reaching back to the old desire:
to stretch their arms across that
dimly lit corridor of the mind,
to those memories hanging with rembrandts –
the mad urge to slash the painting
portraying geese flying in the distance.