Call Me By Your Name

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Call Me By Your Name

a poem, a review, a remembrance

Aug 07, 2022

I still remember the gorgeousness of the sunlit frames of Call Me By Your Name. I think everyone who has seen the film or read the book by Andre Aciman, will find in it intimations of the passages of youth. The exuberance, the anguish, the sweet pain, the mistakes. Youth is nothing but summer. A time never ever looked back with regret.

Do see the video before you read the poem.

(The video is a fan-collection of images from the film, culled from YouTube.) The music -

The poem:

I remember every summer
when the sun was impossibly mine,
I owned it to the point that the flowers
took permission from me to seek its warmth.
Every fibre of mine ached to a liquid exuberance,
a stark pain when everything made sense,
and nothing did.
I could have given a lifetime for that time,
in the water, on the grass, in twilight-dimmed paths,
when time condescended to let us be,
and the hours rested beside the fences where
we sat and found ourselves out.
I remember the electricity of the brush of a finger,
and the nights when I found dreams
woven around that touch,
and how the pain of my body when I was young
was the sweetest damnation which life could ever find.
We reflected each other's bodies in each drop
of our sweat, and when we kissed
we found the sweetness of every summer fruit
on each other's lips.
And even as we found the shadows of our bodies
beckoning to us, with promises of eternity,
we knew the play of seasons,
and the brief interlude of the sun in our lives.
We had wept together for the immeasurable
loneliness which we had found inside of each other,
and why we were each other's lives:
alas, living was ordained for elsewhere.
Of course we raved, of course we cried,
but even as we parted, we knew we would never
ever find that time again, when we spent our
longest hours, but in the shortest summer
of our lives.

Strangely, I always think of winter as a presence and summer as an interlude. Summer is always a passage, to go from one state to another, from one feeling to another, to make mistakes, suffer for them, and never regret them.

So much of our lives is a litany of inevitabilities, and truthfully and figuratively, summers are when we let our souls seek truths, and however much the anguish, we look back at that time and have no regrets.