Francoise Roy - escritora y traductora


The burning wound ripened in brine. It went through all the alembics to end up here, in the most intimate chamber of my mind. Time has come to strip me bare of tainted love, to leave behind the fright of loving you in silence. The group of fairies, magnificent, a white cat as their pet, knows when the liquid, made of a substance similar to tears, is ready for the forsaking operation. Together, they look like bulrush moving in the breeze; stirring the huge kettle with their soup ladle. I am earthbound: except for my dreams, I understand little of magic. I will wake up without remembering your name. The beam of us meeting will have dwindled away. In full light In full light of the evening made bigger by the luminaries, everything that lived in the depths of me was left blind. It all went up, painstakingly, as would an angel with two stones as wings. Where has the soul of each thing lying in the bottom gone astray, what rope could hold it down, since the deep-water animals, while they were going up, even lost their shoes and shed their weight that served as a ballast in me? I am the officiating priestess of their mislaying; I guard the luminous lighthouse of the soul. The passerby rupturing the seals The seals, you broke them without even touching. Just by looking at them. I walk down the streets with my seals broken and people smile; they donxt see a thing —blessed exile of (un)lucidity)—. But I know, I do know the seals are bleeding, I know I leave behind a trail of red spots like a forest animal, mortally wounded, empties itself drop by drop onto the snow linen, leaving dotted meanders that the northern osprey can see from high above. I come to you so you may leave them unbroken. No doubt youxll know how, you have seen the inkwell aspiring the ink back into the hole, leaving the page blank once again; you have seen cutting remarks, once said, go back through the ear tunnel to the sweet nest of the throat. You know a lot about seal mechanics. So seal, I beg you, seal again. My mother tongue is not My mother tongue is not French or any other language: it is what was said in the meninges of the heart. I remember the early words, xje txaime, je suis, viens voirx, not the musical substance of it, but rather the xI love you, I am, come and seex, or xIch liebe dichx, or xVocê e um Anjoux. The homeland sung in other tessitura of the voice shall never be forsaken. Instead, the square eye should, or else, the sharp angles, or else the rounded mouth with its metal opening pointing at the paralyzed marionette, if not the sea snake wrapped around the neck. Gringos would call this wishful thinking. But Mother and her present aftermaths still drag me off, green as I am, along the irregular coral walls, the fish grove fluttering in my ear. Now, the judge is the one sitting on the bench. I too shall go and die in my motherxs kitchen I too shall go and die in my motherxs kitchen. My motherxs kitchen is a casket where she boils a handful of eyes and throats. Where she stitches the white lily into the pastry, her large sack of bent shoulders hanging, her spotless apron. The table does not know how to levitate: itxs a good place, though, where to hide under the tablecloth. I donxt know what language I should speak with my guardian angel: mom dusts the loose ends and I catch a motionless fish. I do not bury it following Christian rites: I swallow it with scales still on, while I watch the red pulp of the watermelon blinking in the oven. Two skylights as a pair of eyes, a love philter that has gone sour, I am being fed jellyfish in their ink. The voices of the dead do not follow their body: this is how I remember the one loitering around the stone garden. 30. Insects III May the horns of the wind cut the earth-bound mooring cables loose. May only the soul untie its greyhounds on paths of freedom so they go back trotting to the honeycomb. My eagerness to be a butterfly drew a door in the air. I crossed the threshold with a legion of insects (dragonflies, coleopterans with true wings). All of us fugitives, holding a bunch of carnations, deflowering the gate of entry! Elytrous rain. Oh, this forbidden mating! Freedom seeks a route where a strings ceremonial is to be followed: a place where to put the hostages down. The burning of Giordano Bruno (1964) – Variation on a painting by Leonora Carrington Oh Giordano, there came upon your very bones the dark silence of the fall! Time to forsake the mesh of voices (the grail of a higher light you are, thwarting a shoal of demons in the middle of your own crowning). You who would not ask the prince of obscure deeds to be handed nobility titles, then a forlorn apprentice —bewitched is the ink dropping from your quill—, how did the guild of death mongers keep its secrets embroidered so tight into the yellow cloak of fire? Ah, behold the carnivorous flowers of your arsons, corollas grown out of a soul seed of yours strangely planted in their own ventricles: how blind they were, how blind, Giordano! Your name like a droplet into their ears anointing you in the flaming bed, a tomb where you were to be born again under the full moon shimmering above as a mask made of snow (a night-borne creature you are: Leonora knew it, she dreamt about you). Sheets made of ember, a wall surrounding you. But in the fleeting burn you laid incorruptible even as you fell in the darkest maze of death. Time had come to fly your own way, drop all the symbols the marrow of fear and dogma should have long aborted in you (mercurial antelopes, flowering lions, birds and bubbles caught in a weightless choreography): skimming through the air they gathered in a flock, hovering above, the igneous haze draping you as a shifting veil, like the whitest, most pristine water-made handkerchiefs. Armistice Here I am, standing with empty hands, the dagger, the whip, the mallet, the knife on the floor, scattered around my shoes. Wheat stalks waiting for the gleaner to come. The angel (pale wings of a black albatross) does not look like someone who would use weapons with a blade. He looks like anything but a hired killer. He leans over with such elegance (my God, a Botticelli painting with a sweet-gaze Madonna) that I think right away: he is going to pick up a bunch of flowers, a dozen chrysanthemums will sprout instantly on the tile floor, and He, because he is clairvoyant, anticipates such miraculous flowering. But not so: with the gesture of a magician, He opens his palm over the objects of violence spread out at my feet, and he makes a bundle out them, as if it were a heap of asparagus or a bunch of daisies, not to say a bundle of firewood. From here I can see Him throw them into the pond, like whoever after a crime wants to erase fingerprints from a gun handle. Seeing he reaches out to me, palms up, I step back. Love, mist, so many things floating around. He looks at me without turning a hair. A marrow of light makes a clean cut on his right cheek. Landscaping A whole field sown with letters. xLetters are the mirrors of wordsx. (vowels and consonants, capital and lower-case, awaiting caesura) A garden of words about to shoot forth, a whole season before the ripe grain. (The land surveyor measures the size of the page, here he comes, armed with a scale; he puts them in pairs, one on each pan: love, sparrow, lightning, death, angel, rainbow, none weighs the same) Winter has shaken its frost-embroidered handkerchief, the geese of Cap Tourmente have flown South and back North again, a lace of greenery spreads like a cobweb over this labyrinth of stones and dirt coming alive. And suddenly, planted like a thousand masts in this swell of green and ochre, chlorophyll and clay, the scarecrows. A whole army of scarecrows, foreheads of coal facing the sun at dusk gently falling over the fields (its light, the flame of a dying candle). In five thousand years, someone will find it: the buried army of some future Xian, perfectly aligned regiments of unarmed scarecrows. (time dissolves spears and shields; the muriatic acid of centuries passing burns everything down, oh the seeds of the heart simmering in the juicy sap of the mind). Nietzsche and Plato strolling around the Mauricie National Park To Daniel and William Slowly did the deep forest breath, flowering sky, autumn caught in branches, great cellulose skeletons exhaling their vegetal selves over three pairs of steps piercing like an awl the live fabric of silence. Behold the majesty of the sun —a yolk high above, a fire diamond in the purest dwellings of blue, a still heart in this pale-colored plain where the pilgrimage of the stars comes to an end! What could I say about the soft stroke the velvet hand of the wind lashes at us —almost a slap in the face—, sunrays like daggers cutting through foliage of carmine inlay? Inoculated by the beverage of oaks and pines, William says: according to Nietzsche, man is a hybrid of tree and ghost. Which were we then, a short-lasting trio walking under golden and sanguine filigree? (the leaves bled out, emptying the sap that kept their tiny clepsydra beating, linden trees and other sweetened species deplumed of their tinkle bells). What secretary of the invisible would know what we were on that one day incarnating at dawn and dying at dusk? So fast do we return to the surgical registries of memory when the clock of nightly skies calls the moon to arms with twelve strokes of a bell. What were we there, the vegetal half —birches with skin and fingers— or else (the anvil of our bodies forsaken), the ghostly half? (only Nietzsche would know, but Nietzsche is dead, the grave has eaten his words, who shall we ask now?): maybe William, who put in Nietzschexs fading mouth the following verses: xA God is dying in the middle of a fire opal the color of sunset / An angel is dying on a whitest glacier / A bird is dying in a forest made of clouds /A dome is dying ravaged by butterflies.x What were we if only three pilgrims on a scarlet rug, the woodxs rush of waves rippling through a nature in rut. How did we become, that one afternoon, royal guests of a green-yellow stillness that shades into blood? In this land sown with a thousand woods and lakes, a poet once wrote: xWho complains about dying alone? What child is given birth to? What grandmother, half-covered by death, whispers to his ears that his soul is immortal?x And the lake beating as a heart in the middle of the forest, piercing frondages on fire, looked like it was made out of metal. I think I saw it floating in Danielxs chest, weightless, as fragile as a paper planet. And while wexre at it (levitation matters, life and death paperwork, elixirs of spirit and poems), I shall say that of the three of us, the Pisces is the one who understands best about floating, about the unfathomable trade with the sky —more of an ocean against all odds. We sat under the benevolent gaze of day stars (light over light, white over white), took pictures by the lake, the dark ripples of its surface back to their resting place in the angle of rotation of the Earth. Lying down on this carpet of mingling colors, surrounded by a thousand dry leaves, William looked like an archangel having exchanged his white gown for shirt and pants, a being of the air happily gone astray, not ascending but heading for a fall (only this way could he ever touch us, stroke our hearts, shed next to those deprived of wings one or two tears). But what would I know about archangels, locked up as I am in the lowest tower of the flesh, tied with double thread to the humble needs of fallen things? Or was William a crucified Christ slowly crossing the air over a patchwork in garnet and saffron, kermes and corinth, tawny and crimson, a sea of amber parchments? Either Christ or angel, after he had risen from his bed of chlorophyll, he said leaves are a solid proof God exists: somebody has to be in charge of counting them, keeping the exact record of each and every one of the cells making up the just-painted fresco of this huge arborescence. Daniel has torn a few leaves from the forearm of a maple to make bookmarks (only a poet can be guilty of such a theft; the woodland does not flinch, gently plucked by these hands made to write verses). God—his accounting book on his lap— will be short of seven leaves when night falls and the daily split of the worlds comes about in a growing chiaroscuro. I know Venus was strolling silently by our side, two steps behind, an inefficient and mute chaperon who would not know how to prevent things from happening (she has no whip, nor does she have a tongue to warn and scold, nor anything but hands bound to caress), making us drunk with the highest potion of Beauty. Beauty: Plato was right, there is indeed a place very high up where pure ideas gravitate, although two millennia and a half later, we still donxt know how, meek and soft, they did incarnate in these woods blessed with the tapestry of fall. I had several concentric bodies I had several concentric bodies. They all emptied into the external cloth, a Russian doll I was without my knowing it. Dear inadvertence, oh divine mother, bandage I used as a scapular around my eyes! How could you not sound the alarm How could you forget to whisper in my ear (the same architecture as a seashell) that I was swimming through a shoal of jellyfish? They are born dancers, archers who always hit the mark despite their fleeting targets, invincible dianas sunken in a water-filled purgatory ! When my fate shone through, it was too late already. The flight of steps, spiral-shaped, I was climbing in a flicker (a Cinderella against the current) led all but nowhere: barely an ornament on the sea floor (like the tiny water-mills aquarium lovers put in the bottom of their fish tanks). I saw myself surrounded by jellyfish: a cloud-full of small octopus boasting their iridescent shimmer and glass stomachs, a score of elegantly flapping handkerchiefs. I thought about emptying my concentric bodies into the most external one, this one made of skin, so as to gain in speed. Reaching the upper step was to no avail: no longer was it about lightness, but jumping headlong. THE ARSONIST I The arson brought from my earlier flights is so small no one has taken notice of him. He bars my way, as if we had an alliance of inequality long forsaken. That is why I burst on the inexistent wall of your closeness, lips indigo, the lips that detected the rumor of a male close by and sprung up as a bud of dark rose. Oh the lips of missing each other in time. From their carmine bark, so venus-like, brought about by these forces of earth and sky swirling around you, the fetus of a mouth not yet created drops like a rainfall. II Ask Meissnerxs corpuscles. Not yours. Yours are loquacity flowers, a bedroom lawn where to lay your lovers in a row, perfect air constructions, geometrical shapes that will not admit tearing. When they do, they turn off as light bulbs. They seek another lie for their tiny spinal cords to stand on end —those, so you said, that were snakes for special eyes. And I, my love, how could I remind you of my own corpuscles, my oxygen-free combustion, my swallowing these words flowing no more like feathers around your mast ? What nerve endings should I touch your voice of ventriloquist with, this voice of yours where the one speaking is so far away from me that I hear but a tinder puppet who could not care less about being close to the fire because it knows the true voice spoke not for the arson ? Moon in Capricorn in the Eighth House Sometimes, the eighth room of the ecliptic conceals a throbbing treasure. Armored, split open on the amatory tablecloth of the nuptial chamber, it turns into the very pit of the alcove, shining glister in the middle of the room barely receiving, through the windowsill, the starsx fruity light, a glare that sucks the glass like an inverse breath. What kind of a caress is to pierce the translucent skin of metal so as to reach the scarlet maze ? What supernatural touch could make its arrhythmia dwindle solely by stroking it ? Which hand whose palm grows orchids, an instrument of instantaneous forge that can melt the iron of the peel ? The limy dwelling of the snail, the rock-like spiral of the hermit crab and the double valve of the mollusk shelter into their hard bowl the softness of the skin; wrapped in its armor, torn from its shell, a trembling stone poised on a three-layer bottom. Footsteps softly enter the mirror. The singing of scales, voices hushing from within the corridor. The whole house fits into the alcove. Heart transplant Maybe you should give me a bit of your frosty heart. In exchange, I would hand over the pounding heart ringing like a bell stroke inside me, and out of the two, we would make one perfect heart, as soft as your touch, an organ yet to be mapped in the anatomy chambers of the seemingly silent gods waiting for us upstairs. Two hearts, one of them the exile of war; the other, of wrinkled souls dying of bubonic plague: both exiles who found a narrow wedding bed where to sink as flimsy as two paper sailboats shaken by a storm at sea. Oh, the dearest places of banishment! Will we ever meet back from exile standing at the crossroads of an unknown map, snow and desert together, love and hatred mixed like the two ingredients of a magic potion? Accidental bleeding The accident sealed within the discreet walls of a room. Blood. The lips of Destiny on us. Blood as white as snow, plasma as yellow as the desert light only known to you in the very first chambers of memory. The whiteboard of day brushed by a hailstorm on your way to the prayer house, for instance, holding your fatherxs hand. (The hand a protecting veil over your small fingers: at the age of five, one is a pebble in the quarry of life). You were given a wide choice of memories to eat from: your father crying under the foliage of an olive tree, the home you lost to war. But memories flutter, a white procession of butterflies: who but me would know what a coffin your heart is, stuffed, by way of linen, with the dead stones of prison? So beautiful these hours soon to grow into parchments, a handful of minutes greedily counted on our behalf by the stingy god of meagerness, a scarce tribute to the branches blossoming on the tree of Time planted long ago by Saturn, hours too few slipping loose under the metal plates of your armored heart as to soften its borders. Oh, the borders drawn on the map of May by foreign kings, an occupation army! So beautiful it was, this spoonful of hours, you might believe in God again, a flickering light hanging loose above your soul. Surgery This firearm wound you have on your head, it looks like it fades every morning washed out by the kindly waters of dawn. And what a wound you have! I am no traumatologist —what would I know about femoral arteries and swelling, platelets and septicemias?— so I stitch as well as I can the small marking of half-opened lips with the shape of an xox delimitating its hems. I have the wisdom of midwives, the age-old knowledge of astrologers, but even so, one day, in some place, (xonly corporal substances are in need of a place to bex) as much as I may succeed in stopping the drop-by-drop hemorrhage that is bleeding you out as patient as a water-clock, maybe, say I, will you reach the rim of that lukewarm hole, that shifting grave where my love —ignoring the exsanguination that is slowly killing you— is waiting for you, in absolute stillness. Poem without a title The portal covered with green slime allows the sound of your footstep crossing to get in. It has been some time since I have seen such a passageway between the outside and the inside. Every step you take draws you closer to me, but a parsec stills keeps us apart. I, being all fondness, shall have to wait in silence, a few centuries still, my lips as motionless as a virgin snowfall, until your orbit gets closer to mine. When would it ever take place, that meeting between an adam and an eve hidden in opposite bodies, like the hug we gave each other in my dreams? With this God of ours who is so very mute, the only thing I hear is the stridulation of crickets, cicadas and countryside musicians of the like. What answer could I ever get from the One whose lips are sown together with barbed wire? 6. The cardiac ventricles It takes two of them to assemble the heart, a double raspberry the size of a fist, a trembling medlar that drips with the sweet juices of love, metronome of the days counted by God —God who according to the Torah must look after his creatures— at the beginning of every life. A bivalve organ, two half-fruits separated by a partition, it toils day and night in a rythmic singing, systole and diastole, an organ from which the anatomists have drawn the most beautiful words: apex cordis, ostium infundibuli, septal band, crista supraventricularis (crista: would it be a female version of the Master whose preaching goes between feelings?), subinfundibular epithelium, papillary muscles, as such a plethora of sounds tolling like a series of chimes : sanguine verses in a tongue different from our own. The face of Venus Attract me, wexll run. Thérèse de Lisieux Our Lady who reigns over sugar. Maiden of the things that keep us wake. No pebbles in her fist, no vermin on her lips \ she does not slash, nor does she thrust. A bunch of asphodels grows out of the seams on her gown; a carpet of yarrows unrolls by itself under the sole of her hands. xxxAll that syrup in the socket of the ear, all that satin in the drapes of the bridal chamber, while the fibrillation of the skin signs the length of nautical beds in the highest and lowest hours of the night. Listen, prick up your ears, the scented fruits of love are coming, there they are, caressing the bows of these coffins where lovers die of split-minute deaths under the soft rolling of the waves : at the None of juices, the canopied sky lurks gently over us and the waning moon becomes the witness of bodies washed away by light.xxx Magnet, centripetal dartboard of tiny comets, the ribbons of comely faces get entangled in its bending axe ; kisses fall like seeds scattered by her gleaning hand; the weaving of luxurious fabrics simply goes on in the abiding, patient looms of time. Etching I Water seal. Seal of an etching in the half-done easel of an oil-painting studio hung up way above the clouds. And the ocean here, swelling, a bottle of white ink suddenly spilled in the bodyxs harbor. I find myself surrounded by your anemones waving at me their transparent heads, ring-a-ring-a-roses of garden spiders, their tentacles dancing around, wreathing with the nebulous poise of a dead creature. Those who have drowned whisper their last words into my ears. Stagnant-water poison I shall swallow drop by drop every time you come visit afar from your hidden oceans (God and His heteronyms, His voices). And the idleness of a lofty hour tensed by the arc of your night. Venom as elixir in an alchemy smelter : yes, you are right, what keeps you alive is indeed killing me. II The ocean, rolling in its watery blankets, unbuttons to receive your last gaze in a bed of coral and seaweeds entangled in fluttering garlands. Fallen pieces of eternity, the Neptunian sea of your mind; it spills over, gigantic bottle emptying in a lake I did not know was my own. The liquid so released wades through the peaked roof laid between the two of us. And like a two-body sheaf it cuts our stem threefold (Father, Son and Spirit, this one not Holy but the ghost of flesh seeking the memory of bliss kneeling by an Easter candle). I become the torn-up linen sail and the topping lift on the mast you put up at will, yes indeed, straight into the sky and even more transparent than the crystalline lenses where is cast your image of a sea in terra firma. Cocoon The living also have shrouds, but they appear in the form of cocoons, the invisible cocoons that invisible hands God forgot under his pillow weave carefully around us like a white shiny pitch. Chrysalis we were that developed backward, whole then the silky net was woven for the first time around them, dissolving at the exact moment that love touched their spindle, making us the eggs of something winged that the anvil of the earth kept down on terra firma. But such heat did the cocoon give off! The heart is indeed a silkworm. Time slid through the room like a sailboat, the floor frozen into a sea of hardened waves completely still under the bed we laid in. Everything made of silver, did you notice? Dowry What kind of a dowry could I give you, the body my only belonging, a pearl inside its invisible shell only your competent hands could open? We only recognize light by looking at the shadow it casts. Temporary ID Who was I? An object at worse; a flower at best, germinating in the soil of your hand. A sunflower lasting sixty minutes, a single day, a week if we had been lucky, linen unstained by the soil of that hand. Was your soul the star I was following, my corolla turning towards it as it slowly crossed the sky? (yes, your soul did cross the ceiling) Or were you just a toy playing with another toy (the puppet of a ventriloquist playing with a doll)? I prefer the version of the flower, the perfume, and the room heavily scented. The wedding trousseau A trousseau for the worldxs shortest marriage (possible years turned into minutes by art of magic), skins coming together and parting like the two pans of a curtain. A trousseau I handed you over following a promise soon to be hidden among a deck of secrets shuffled in my hands, as invisible as your name on my list of men beloved. Wedding and mating in a split second, oh dearest, how short the night under our stars! We, shining targets of a weapon we both know the name of. Stay in front of the glass Stay in front of the aquarium. Look at the dance of jellyfish, their fragile mesoglea. Touch the glass separating you from them: you also came from an aquarium, although you donxt remember. (It is not an evil mirror but a transparent wall). There you shall see them, in the liquid gunpowder of your rage, grow wings and have their nightingales become prey birds under the water. You donxt need binoculars: you are next to them, your nose touching the glass, seeing the submarine dovecot where a flock of birds pecks at your heart. Your heart hanging on a hook behind the glass wall. First love poem Maybe you should give me a little of your frosty heart. In exchange, I would hand you a piece of the one that rings as a bell inside me, and out of the two, we would make a perfect heart, as soft as your touch, an organ not yet mapped in the anatomical chambers of the gods, those apparently silent who wait for us with their hands opened, guardian spirits of the kisses who order us to separate after loving. Stateless hearts that found a narrow nuptial bed where to sink, as brittle as paper sailboats shaken during a storm at sea. Love, this place of banishment! Will we ever find each other, some day, back from our exiles, standing at the crossroads of an unknown map, snow and wasteland together, soul and time mixed together like the two ingredients of a magic potion? Third love poem I wonder how deep I would have to dig under the bark of your skin in order to find it, now a caged bird, then an orchid or a diamond glowing by itself in the dark, a light-filled tear running down the cheek of the Universe. To dig like one digs a grave, blistered hands holding a shovel. Layers of fabric of all kinds on top of it —a beating placenta, it unfolds over the distance that separates your hand from my body, my body nothing could ever hurt when you are close to me—. I, on the other hand, wear it right under my skin like a full-body glove that could have slid through a slot on my chest, my skull, wherever something as thin as a razorblade might cut slashing through the darkness of the guts. The only thing you have to do is scratch my chest with your fingernails and you will see it exposed, a raw wound I bear. My skin rolled around your heart. Acid poured by a hand without fingers The heart, a circle around it, the vial filled with acid poured by a hand without fingers. The eye, the eyelids cut into a lace pattern by the scalpel held by the other hand without fingers. Christxs hand-palm, the blood clot removed by the Angels from Mohammedxs heart, the waters of the Red Sea opened as a wound. And the sun here, the hues of that watercolor where God painted a body for us, love gnawing at Satanxs dogs even though love is invisible. It will shine, it will be the firefly planted like an oak tree between our ribs, we who drink bile, we who are bound to the panacea like fish are to the fluidity of water. Continental Divide Is it a line? A stroke immeasurably thin? A microscopic string to be cut by your scissors? Stitches not to be seen at first sight, first touch, first smell. A line you yourself draw, that gets tense and loose and spins around the stroke it leaves in space. Why did you lay it that way? Why did you summon it? Why did you fetch it from the lost-object box? So lightning, so sharp, it hurts my parallels and meridians just by stroking me as I get near. And now that it has come into being, I shall look at it very carefully so as not to cross the threshold, stretched to its limit, the wired tread coming out of your silkworm. I know it is there, keeping me apart from you, a century or an ocean before the caravels. Jellyfish I can only getting rid of by drowning You stick to my legs, jellyfish the current pushes towards me again and again, A translucent shroud, you break the courtship procession of the algaes to come floating —a shimmering handkerchief in the breeze— slowly drifting to kiss me again when the next waves breaks ashore. Leech miasma, mouthless vampire, I have cut you, torn you off, slashed you and you grow again from the smallest part of yourself. I pull you off my skin and it is as if from the salt were growing tiny hands, pushing you again towards me, sniffing the trail I leave behind. You are like the bat who even blind separates silence from noise and knows the cardinal points her eyes refuse to see. I look at you approaching, licking my ankles, going up along my legs up to the groin —my God, all blood will be sucked out of me— as if we were bound by a strange kinship or the memory of paramecia sliding through ancient waters. No matter how far I step back, trying to avoid your ocean-borne hug, I can still look at you in the eyes : I see an arch, a convent in the snow, an asylum, an astrologer, a magic lamp, poems. A veil you are, a sticky fabric covering my mouth. And not only a jellyfish that bears the words in its iridescent belly, not only the tide with its rolling wave: you are also the pin piercing the body of the insect. A cobweb. A web not of spider but of another specie unknown to me. A creature of God with as many legs as He disposed of, but harmless, a beast of light weaving a shroud over my mouth so I cannot call for you, tell you the half-eaten words you longed to hear. What would your word be? Speak, said Paul Celan in a poem, but do not separate xyesx fromxnox. What, then, may have been your word if you were only allowed you to say one? xBoltx to lock in your prison the things you lost? xClockx to restitute the time we did not spend together? xWindowx to bend over the light of the universe touching us at the same time despite such a dire distance? No. You will have said xmirrorx to take away with you the last image. The vena cava Vena cava: the red greyhound running loose inside your thin walls, ichor of a lesser state, brimming with innocuous poisons, eager as it is to reach the cardiac kidney (eternal water clock, nocturlabium of the body) while changing dark brown into scarlet. Both vena cava a pair of hemoducts sewn in such a delicate sewage, stems of an invisible flower —stipula cordis—, unique in the guild of prey animals, carrions, gleaners and garbage collectors (carbon dioxide, what a bombastic way to say xwaste productx!). They no doubt deserve to be decorated with a medal for their cleaning labor, their luminous necrophilia. Blessed captivity for the scolopendra of the bloodstream this brook agitating in its roller coaster the fluttering pennants of the red blood cells. First love poem Maybe you should give me a little of your frosty heart. In exchange, I would hand you a piece of the one that rings like a bell inside me, and out of the two, we would make a perfect heart, as soft as your touch, an organ not yet mapped in the anatomical chambers of the gods, those apparently silent who wait for us with their hands opened, guardian spirits of the kisses who order us to part after loving. Stateless hearts that found a narrow nuptial bed where to sink, as brittle as paper sailboats shaken during a storm at sea. Love, this place of banishment! Will we ever find each other, some day, back from our exiles, standing at the crossroads of an unknown map, snow and wasteland together, soul and time mixing like the two ingredients of a magic potion? Mirror, mirror what would your worb be, tell me whoxs the most talented? Mirrors [..] are always blank pages. (this is where we write in our own handwriting). There are all kinds of mirrors: big and small, necessary and useless (yours is indeed invisible) There are ones with multiple facets, where we can see the multicolored plot of a lifetime (his has a surface as smooth as a frozen pound). There are also mirrors like prisms, where light does not allow itself to be caught. But he disregards that kind of mirror: what he sees reflected in his own mirror is completely flat, no edges at all. And there are other kinds which only repeat onexs own image: these are the mirrors of people who are in love. Someone in love, in the case I am now referring to, with his own words (xto denouncex, xto colludex, xto conspirex). Other mirrors are brittle as the dried blood of a wound. (his wound will never heal if he keeps repeating this: xThe medals shone on her neck; I, among all, a Virgil, a Dante, a Rimbaud coming late to the hem of the Twenty First Century, should have gotten the scholarship insteadx. There are some who reflect what is already known and thus stimulate ignorance (this is the kind of mirror he hangs on his walls, the black-magic temple his bedroom has become). Others are made of incandescent silver like stars never born. And there are also mirrors that are fortunetellers, able to thread fate by having their surface caressed with a left hand or when a pentagram made with the petals of an orchid is placed in the center. (He has slid his left palm over the quicksilver a thousand times, he has put in the middle of the reflecting glass the logo of the conspirators, the ones in charge of guarding the entrance doors to the Kingdom.) The oldest mirror of all is jet black and reflects the Great World, like an impossible Book, the reverse of every soul, the dark wrong side of the fabric. The soul of the one who scrutinizes other souls is made of obsidian, a mirror made of black gold, fossil fuel where these words of the Pleistocene —a rancid litany repeated since the beginning of times— are decomposing and shall become rotten. Stadaconé, 1680 As props of the North —invisible steps at an amble from air stallions standing still in front of the sky gates—, the leaves of maple trees in the fall are pulled off by the tweezers of the wind (forests made of masts before the word xmaplex even existed in a European language, masts decorated with the golden lace where foliages are bleeding their sap out, the sap that two weeks ago made these tiny pieces of vegetal plasma beat). The same way a monk from Baja California, besieged by the sun and its needles in the Mexican desert, asked himself xHow many thorns does this country have?x, I wonder if Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain asked themselves how many squalls licked the endless hills covered with snow. Maybe as many as the different winds the sea had —a cloth of mercury under the compass rose— to push forward with its fingers the orthogonal flowers of the great white sails navigating the Saint-Lawrence River. And what is to be said —almost a slap in the face—, about the velvet fingertips of the wind caressing the woods, sunrays sliding through leafage like daggers cutting the lacy carmine? A land of whistles blowing through the foliage, a land of Indians who considered their dreams as their very own christ. A drop A drop. Acid and balsam. Poison and its antidote. A drop in the liquid caldron of hours passing. Others before me have said it better: I went towards the door/without turning back on my soul asleep /I heard the ancient tinkling of her steps and the bell stroke of my heart. Or else, people unknown to me have explained the redness of my chest that was unknown to them: I am alone./The weight of love /Has buoyed me up/Till my head/Knocks against the sky. /See me!/My hair is dripping with nectar— Starlings carry it/On their black wings. The weight, the anvil of memories, a wine press where to grind the minutes spent without seeing you. Lingerie kept in drawers, sealed, sealed by the padlocks of time passing. Pericardium: the fabric of a translucent petal. A two-leaf case wrapping in its invisible valves the beating pearl of the heart. Satin tegument, a mesh where God has bestowed the bright-red jewel pumping the heady sap of blood. What effect could you ever have on the flickering almond the clockmaker from Above has entrusted you? Should you draw a veil on it to make its flesh evermore secret? Should you protect it as if the finest coating of a shield made of organza? Should you drape it, a milky cloth, an onion skin hiding the nesting dolls of the cardiac chambers, so the passing of death, peeling it, shall only leave behind —gem shining in the very core with the glow of a sun before it withers away—the tiny bone of love? I have an entire life left I have an entire life left to separate the kernels of your leaving me, to pick up and turn around every stone. The only thing left, overbearing, is silence: immutable witness of the Earth. Look inside and you shall see those who have lived through its night, those who were bitten by love, those snatched from their dreams, by the day-time quartz, those who walk around without a roof, without shoes, without the minutes, the hour hands of a very old clock to restitute them back into time passing and the ways of the Earth. Where then, if not inside me, in the whitest artesian well of oblivion, could your solitary soul have gone into hiding, this soul of yours germinated in pain like the petal of a flower, a flower death has brought into full bloom? Combustion processes Sweet catastrophe of the bodies being consumed, bridle of childhood tying us up to the heart tree (ripe hearts fell off; others, unripe, will end up rotting on the branch). Oh kiss sleeping on a knife, do you remember my mouth? I love you when you burn. Will you burn my blood? The kiss does not answer and turns a deaf ear to my begging torture, turning towards the wall where moonlight casts the shadow of our only body, a four-legged two-spinal-chord twenty-fingered animal brimming with memories. Sweet catastrophe of the bodies consumed. When we met, we had to touch from afar not to go up in flames, hide the clandestine dagger under our skins not to mutually slash our throats while hugging. Humming and quacking while we are bartering Insects humming in their flight from your body to mine. The wind quacking on the edge of the asphodel field we use as our bed to lie in. Porcelain eyes ingrained on the trees that see us bartering antiques under a moonlight brighter than the one shining the night before. The bartering goes on: our skeletons heat up, they glisten, red-hot like horseshoes in the forge. The sun, tightened in its corset of light, will comply with its schedule, tumbling the moon at dawn, but meanwhile, where would that thing of ours go on beating, so out of place? I see it startle in the parts of the body where we grow ornament pebbles, usually after watering them with miraculous water. Our heartbeat does not dwindle, nor will it do so until we hear the chimes of morning prayers; maybe the last hours of penumbra will pass through the eye of the needle darning us together, and we shall be granted one more poplar, a lapis lazuli at no charge, an improvised fountain where to go wash our hair. It wonxt be long before it happens: our faces, glowing from inside because of the heated bone lattice, will soon stop shining to then drop on our lap. But morning has not broken yet, and no storm, no matter how violent, can tear them off now. I will call you Micaela I will call you Micaela, or Sarah, or Teresa, because you have no name. An unburied ghost you are who scattered around the fruits of summer. What an uninhabited place, Micaela, where to live, where to line up passing days under the somber enamored roofs. And I, in the crowd surrounding you, was always missing. Such a bouquet of odorant smells, Sarah, brimming with the scent of your childhood’s magnolias, the maple trees who witnessed your romance, earth anew after the thawing of snow and shoes of your days long gone-by. And I have been nothing more than an eclipse in your carnal outfit. What a live collection of objects, Teresa, most likely surrounded you, I will call you Micaela I will call you Micaela, or Sarah, or Theresa, because you have no name, an unburied ghost you are who scattered around the fruits of the summer. What an uninhabited place, Micaela, where to live, where to put passing days in line under the somber enamored roofs. And I, among the crowd surrounding you, was always missing. Such a bouquet of odorant smells, Sarah, brimming with the magnolias of your childhood, the maple trees that witnessed your romance, earth anew after the thawing of snow and shoes of your days long gone-by. And I have been nothing more than an eclipse in your carnal outfit. What a live collection of objects, Theresa, most likely surrounded you no objects like statues made of marble. Among all these objects of yours was there ever any room for something that was mine, something that on your death bed you may have left me as an amulet? you may have left me as an amulet? Conversion of the sheets Sheets made of tiny grains. Close by does the ocean roar, high tide gathering its mares for the liquid gallop gnawing the seashore away, trifling woodworm repeating the flooding to the rhythm of the undertow, brush of a feather that does not dent the rock while putting the sand right in its place. Sheets that go from a nuptial cloth to becoming shrouds to becoming hammocks to becoming flags undulating in the ocean wind caressing boats decked for triumph or shipwreck to become handkerchiefs where to dry our tears to become vestures —oh timexs visitations, a sparkle in the black eye, trine of single note —that a few hours can completely unravel. Remembering something soft Down of a peach against my palm more ephemeral than the time it took me to realize you were here, lying next to my hunger. The vintage of man over woman has gone by, but the softness of that pocket-size sun, so juicy, remains in my memory despite all the other objects decorating that moment like garlands —the skein unthreading its silky white yarn in your hands, the cardamom inside the tongue, the moon, breakfast, the glass of wine, the deceased appearing in bedrooms at night—, all of them having vanished like ghosts sliding back into their tombs, floating in between two deaths. Tree conversion from two to one Now everything is like my heart, a color at the edge of blood Faiz Ahmed Faiz So much of a labyrinth, all this liquid foliage covering the branches and compressed in only two arteries. The branches, the frond of our carmine veins on the wall the moon lightens for a while, casting the light she borrowed from the sun. Two hearts converted into a single one reaching the apex of its chimes. And then, time passes, red as it is, spawning its egg cells in you; and silence, the wall that remembers nothing. Maybe by invoking the god of words can we revive that memory, perhaps it would bring to life what you could have said, clutched onto these hooks of yours. A canopy for stars to bloom on A black canopy just above us, sown with pasqueflowers flickering in the dark. Roots where nothing burst into bloom at ground level, but higher up, on the trapeze where we climbed thinking we were kites sailing off to the faculae of the sun, inside the vortex of a cosmic storm. Ah, spaces shrinking on timexs spinal cord, gloves on hands that grew too big, and you, getting smaller and smaller, until what is left of your presence is nothing but a spot around which I shall keep revolving, long afterwards. The spiritual life of flowers Flowers have souls, gladiolas have souls, stones locked up in their matter of stone have souls, listen, men of peace, to the minuet of souls. Wait, be still, do not spread your wings to fly away, sit at the table as if you were human. Do not feed me so fast with that spoon, the spoon of words you have picked in the Orchard of the Lord. Wait, my mouth is full. Each tooth is a jewel, a turquoise, a glitter of obsidian, wait until I chew the words. If you feed me too many words at once, I will choke. Hems What did you tell Death when it came around? What could you possibly have told her bending over at the window that you alone had placed on the highest wall? Wait, I am still singing. Wait, the hem still needs ten stitches and I am so slow weaving. What did you tell her when only one grain of salt was left to fall in the hourglass? A trip of no return You came to dwell in the nest of my throat with the harshness of thorns. Life, like an abacus, counts the days in straight lines with no possible turning back. And this wound of yours moves the sequins of the abacus, ordering everything, patiently rotating happy moments and misfortunes. Dictation Dictate the words to me. Dictate as the Gabriel of the New Testament pronounced the words of the Annunciation. Give me the strength to read the parchment hurting my eyes, like the other Gabriel, having appeared in front of Mohammed, ordered him to read the Koran. I will declaim whatever you dictate: the hole is dark inside, bowels come out of a place that is not theirs, the beings of Light look at all that on their supersonic screen hanging in the sky like a honeycomb on the cornice of an age-old building, but they can do nothing about it, the paper has to unroll completely. They faces are soaked in tears made of zirconium, the tears of a fountainhead, the tears of the primeval oceans that have dried up under the fire of these women in flames, the heat of the suns they are holding in their fists to replace their missing hearts.