poetry

5

How can you tell the difference between a sunrise and a sunset

if you can’t hear your footsteps, if you can’t see your shadow

when you lift your foot into the air and lower it to the ground?

What does a sunrise sound like, or a sunset,

if all you hear is a heart racing

in the face of this light?

What becomes of the memory of this body that watches

the sun rise and set as if it were meant only for it?

Sunrise and sunset, different memories, the same light.

7

Once, love was everywhere.

It was like snow in winter, like flowers in spring,

like the long days of summer and the yellowed leaves carried by the wind

down narrow little streets when summer was no more.

A usual presence and manifestation,

maternal, if one can say that everything that exists

has a mother.

Each thing was, at the beginning,

a miracle and a delight,

a tear resting on a blade of grass in the dawn,

an endless field you enter carefully

so you don’t wet your feet.

8

Once, love was in plain sight,

strong and gentle and without spot.

Immortal, it walked among people

working miracles. The great love

over each person’s small love,

like an eyelid, like a strong hand,

simple and clear, a single sky above us.

And now there is a strange fog

drifting through the city, possessed,

the echo of fires,

of small hearts burning without cause,

a labyrinth of memory,

each one carrying, like a fragile light,

its own small love, searching for the way out,

a sheltered path through the ruins.

9

Nothing can be heard or seen ahead.

A painful echo searching for an obstacle

so it can turn back.

A being, a thing forgotten on the table,

still holding the warmth of a touch,

waves and shadows that I call to answer me

with the same warmth.

Waves and shadows, come,

let us warm ourselves together.

10

How much light I have wasted for nothing,

my black box,

this little house abandoned on a mountaintop,

why do I still carry you with me

wherever I go. And I go in circles.

The true form does not reveal itself.

The true hand is the sound of the refuse truck

vanishing around the corner.

That is how the fruit turns into flower

and bud, and empty place.

23

The storm skirts the city and this table.

Young arms all around, tattooed with wasps and lightning,

with promises of rain, of eternal life,

of love to the very end.

Chained arms, veins, radiation, flow.

Rivers without a bed, dancing, we were

in a nightclub

where a red ray creates and destroys the world.

Glass serpents, our arms

on the glass abandoned, dirty, table

beneath the sky throbbing a wound, its black mirror

on which are flung

again and again the stars-dice

and words words, empty glasses

hypnotically shining:

shield sword spasm scare glance

I sense I say I bleed sparks sighs

trance seduction sex surface siege

seism sedatives submission shredding sublime

pulse breath savage star solitude

harsh scales shuddering pain down the spine

narrow space just to say the first syllable

so litude unbearable sheet still blank

no man is an island scattered in a dream

slag the scorched window looks like it snowed on it

scream with me chaos vowel the sun

shattered bone see rises once again