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 don’t 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 you’ll 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, “je t’aime, je suis, viens voir”, not the musical substance of it, but rather the “I love you, I am, come and see”, or “Ich liebe dich”, or “Você e um Anjou”.
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 mother’s kitchen
I too shall go and die in my mother’s kitchen.
My mother’s 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: it’s a good place, though, where to hide under the tablecloth.
I don’t 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 with 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.
“Letters are the mirrors of words”.
(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
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 Nietzsche’s fading mouth the following verses: “A 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.” What were we if only three pilgrims on a scarlet rug, the wood’s 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: “Who 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?” 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 Daniel’s chest, weightless, as fragile as a paper planet. And while we’re 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 don’t 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 ARSON
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 Meissner’s 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 stars’ 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 father’s 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 “o”
delimitating its hems.
I have the wisdom of midwives,
the age-old knowledge of astrologers,
but even so, one day, in some place,
(“only corporal substances are in need of a place to be”)
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, we’ll 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.
▪▪▪All 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.▪▪▪
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.
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.
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 body’s 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 (God, 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.
