Beginning of Writing
… and my work becomes an endless
toil in a shoreless sea of toil.
Rabindranath Tagore
Light is present in the absence you read.
Edmond Jàbes
It’s the discomfort, of not knowing how
to forget, what to do with the irremediable
: passage of time—original rhythm
that in a weak effort debouches
“Once the world was flooded
by the fury of a marine language”
they told me as a child and I didn’t understand
I didn’t know about great destructions
about the passage of time / a blow / an impulse
in the throat / a tickle / light
of grain / of salt / a fistful of syllables
ignites / to say / what I can
conscious of the uselessness
—beautiful like a ruby in excrement—
in every effort / perfumed pus
with which scented candles are made
in the palace of vanity
To ride a line, a nerve
: always in free fall the white blade
that cuts the words: tooth or page
rush from a fierce waterfall
dismembered angel / pieces that
will never console a life
Useless mouth, it alone debouches
the hightide of a rhythm that doesn’t know
if it ascends or descends, like the line
of a back that, blind, desires sculpts
as if who I am were somebody else
and had another way of being named
although the shed skin is mine
and the same anxiety made landscape
is the one his green eyes see
Who, where, why, since when, already?
Son of abandonment / of ire
to say you need another name
that isn’t that of your father who sings
the songs of disillusionment
between the washed-out hill and the sea
Your red gold tongue tempered
in the chalice of woman to embroider
words from a female fire
exact prayer that will at last calm
the voice in the gods’ instability
“I tell you: a sword the heart
will cross” an old man said
upon seeing me in my mother’s arms
I don’t know if he told me, her
or every woman destined to love me
Father
You who knows beforehand
and have given my heart a lake
to breathe
to lose
every point of view
let me be an animal
caged in the single drip
of a moment
barely aware
of danger and desire
: claws
that take my hands and lead me
inside my body until hunger
instinct’s bitter flower
shows me:
run
devour
mate
sleep
Allow
these words to barely be
the tired leaf
detached from silence
faded color
of what once was
a little bit of hope
whitewash on a little bit of sky
prayer arisen from water that gives thanks
fire that gives it wings
pain that allows it to flow
serve again
Let me be the fish / bread of only one day
in the withered oven
Drop of water
on the wounded body
Nothing
lasts, since everything is an evanescent
memory of someone who forgot
that he’s forgetting. We only imagine
what we once were
: son, father
What we are
: water from the same sludge
clay from the same river towards the sea
My Dear Moby
In the sea where the whale lives
(the great fear that swallowed my father)
I find myself swimming alone
Water everywhere I look
Red is the sky, a more wounded water
just as inviting that above as below
Ilimitada (emotion in another language)
: there’s no land in sight where I can anchor
nor beginning nor end
over the surface of my life
A giant shadow approaches
perhaps it’s my dark passenger
the one who vomited my father on the coast
from a foreign land where he’s a prophet
“He who chants the word,” they call him
Days like years / lustrums like seconds
I don’t know how I arrived and it no longer matters
if what I feel is dream or reality
Not fear or exhaustion, I only see
a sudden darkness
that emerges from the depths and closes over me
I don’t know if I was devoured
or rescued from a liquid hell
of a wasteland that nothingness said
: suddenly I live in a disgusting stench
dark movement from a cave
sitting on a tongue that I find comfortable
although its texture may be
the roughest
on which a person or word lives
Something tells me I should learn from it
before once again I am
expelled
