Flatlands
Of this I know: the fear of the white
But now—as of now—the light doesn’t stain.
I can think that I did none of what
I’ve done.
An old moon spits ash
staining the flatlands, embellishing it:
landscape without tombs or statues:
barely a wall—supported by stilts.
Below, my feet: there is no shadow over the dust.
Above, the dark: I prowl
pretending to have a path and a destination.
It’s the hour in which nothing shines.
In a place, I don’t know where,
a presence strikes, moving like reptiles
—like a wild beast that slips away—,
watches me pass with the rhythm
of an impulse buried so many times.
A thickness accumulates
And I swallow.
Scrape the tongue, its sickness.
You said: it has to pass through the throat
to get better… and then we’ll see…
and I swallowed. And again.
In a place, I don’t know where
You are asleep—still—in a box, small, illuminated
A scene without memory.
And then what? A door slammed—to be after what’s
happened. I remain.
Trying to say something that I can’t quite reach.
You, on your side, your glance like a lizard’s
Scratching, without nails, what remains unfinished.
Without anything becoming evident. Then we’ll see…
It is best to ignore certain habits, I think.
To not look, to not notice… we’ll see…
Now, a century later, in the blind night of the flatlands
There is a song that ends. I pause.
But nothing begins.
The vertical electrifies, and I move forward
towards the wall
Hardly a wall—supported by stilts
I scratch the misleading rust of the metal
And in that insistence, the echo of
A dream that has to be chewed in the way one chews
A stone.
The rust under my nails,
I begin to dream an instrumental dream:
A fugitive beast on the wet pavement,
The tentative shape of its silhouette
Stretches the night.
The beast—whole—facing me:
made of immaculate blood,
immune to the event and the image.
You, who see, have seen it
shine, resplendent and naked, without dust,
and have traced on paper
its fang and its breath—white on white.
I fear squeezing it out—the beast—until I make it cry.
Still, before the unpenetrated night,
I am the impulse and I am
The tenderness of terror.
An ordinary movement: flatten the curve
Of the glimmer of light over the damp.
Who wouldn’t call the beast a beast?
What Devours is a Machine
What devours is a machine
That you thought you saw that one time
waking up from a dream
—not quite having shaken it off.
So you said good morning
in the language of another
You carried on, inevitably,
iron in your eyes.
To open your eyes, then,
is to break yourself apart from the middle.
To see, with borrowed eyes
the twisting of the ivy
growing on the other side.
A small turn in the shadow
recalls the terror of a curtain, shifting,
outside the half-open window.
It is not difficult to see:
Even a rag, suspended, needs to escape
the void that lives inside.
In the name of which guilt does the machine work?
You don’t know who operates it.
But the avenger has cast his bait
Spreading its cackle beneath the noise of metals
that reverberate on the surface
of a dry night
—emphatic, stubborn, defeating the dust.
You chase the gravity of a presence.
You beg for anything—anything!
Nothing responds. The outside is unimportant
when no one is looking.
When there are sharp tones
disjointed from every organ.
When everything unfolds one step below
what allows itself to your touch.
You root yourself in that fiction
of good mornings—while it lasts.
The machine lives outside this fiction:
the hunger for a mirror
to which you say, I, to return to the dream
without the metallic din
of an ivy, creeping.
Translated by Ashmita Chatterjee
