There is no suffering if you do not want anything

You’re right about the poet—and how right you are.
Poets are liars, obsessed.
They try to hammer […] love back to nonexistent simplicity.
You’re right—they shouldn’t do that.
It isn’t possible and they shouldn’t pretend.
- Elif Batuman, The Idiot

It is true that I went too far. 

Something simple about boundaries
and delicacy or discretion

had begun to elude me. 
You may continue to blame me and
I can live with that but—

according to a very famous play
(which I'm sure you've heard of)

Blanche explains that the opposite of desire 
is death (death!)
Asked Mitch: So do you wonder?

I don't wonder, or really 
we didn't have to wonder, did we?

It was the easiest thing in the world to do
but terrible and agonizing
to have done.

I mean, physically agonizing.
Like a toothache.

Like a beetle in the lung.
Sometimes desire
is its own death

(and has no opposite).
No one ever battered me

quite like you. 
Early on you told me
about a set of mathematical proofs

which show that two curves
with infinite length

can have a finite area
between them. 
Koch's snowflake. 

Gabriel's wedding cake.
But the converse is never true.
I don't know why 

you told me these things.
Poetry is always trying 

to manufacture metaphors,
even from mathematics.
I shouldn't have wanted

to understand you
or anything at all.

Only ever a despair,
knowing. Wanting.
Anything at all.

And proof
as every day, it became
harder and harder

to measure any finite space
between us. I'm sorry

for falling in love with you. 

You have no idea how sorry.
Even the idea of it
is revolting and obscene,

like eating food off the floor.
I'm not suggesting

there was any better
outcome. In general,
I'm okay. As a rule,

I think detachment
is a good thing. Unlike you,

always looking for some other life
to climb into. You only wanted
to wander around

and pontificate and sulk,
as if things couldn’t be knowable,

(except you called it brooding).
I should have known.
How can I know

if you won’t tell me.
Certain words can suggest a story

but aren’t the story (I became
an expert in extrapolation). Then

it stung, but I couldn't unknow.
Is memory is a weakness or
just an albatross.

I don’t know.
I’ve tried to give it back.

I don’t know you. I may have
once, but how brief

the life of a spark
compared to the housefire.

Desire can be
its own death.

You have no idea how sorry.