A Time to Dance [antikvár]

ONE Darling Bemadette, As you have forbidden me to talk to you I must write. Today, if I am lucky, I will see you but not touch you; follow but not meet you; love at a distance, shunned. Amor vindt omnia. Remember? That was the love for God which conquered everything. Your religion. Mine too now - in my way. For I have found that earthly love delivers no less. My love for you has conquered me. Its ferocity has led me to do things I would despise in others. It has overawed me with its turbulence, its banality, its power to twist my life around its lightest whim. The casualties of this passion are all about me and yet -1 would not have it any different. What others condemn as a waste of life I hold to as my time of crowning happiness. Even the grief is remembered with desire: the necessary thorn protecting my incomparable rose. Bemadette, black hair swaying across your eyes and mine, as you knelt above me, looked down, your slim oval face with the solemnity of a Madonna, and locked into me tightly, the wanton Magdalene, leaning your breasts onto me, erect nipples grazing on my hungry skin. Amor vindt omnia does not only mean love for God but God's Love: in that case also I claim it. What else could it be that we had? Those moments when you closed your black eyes and murmured "Ssshhh . . . listen " the sound of us together my own eyes closed, joining you in our darkness which art heaven. And you opened your eyes for me to see the tiny speckles of dove grey flickering in the velvet-black pupils. Just below your right eye at the outside comer, placed there with perfect eighteenth-century delicacy, is the beauty spot you