No one answers me, you know it.
I grow in no one’s head, you also know it.
I cannot even be freshness in the fire that burns us all, you know it.
What I say from my hill will alter me some on your hill, you also know it.
What I lob from my hill will bar you in on your hill, I know it.
Our cries rise in step with the obliviousness we share, we know it too.
Knowledge is of no help to us.
We know it.
/
Without our grasping what thread will unspool the rest of what we say.
I gaze with my eyes that see nothing of what stares me back and sees me not
I gaze at what loses me in its noise
I bore the eye
to fill it
with what I cannot see
to become trunk, become stone
and the fly that skims me
the same way it skims the trunk and the stone
the same way it sets down onto me
so you can live the intimacy of the fly
a little speech, a little thirst
in praise of the arcing water that spells them out
I know that the ant is the same shade as the earth I ingest
even if I can fill my belly with wild strawberries
shoots of firs
sniff out some remains
glimpse the tops of some trees
away from pennants and eyes
but the fly knows the spider is stalking it
that its feet are entrapped
it knows that its wings can close down
they know their pursuit can end in my mouth
each then bears down on me with its weapons
each wants to distance me from my own
so that my life
may
lengthen
theirs
As soon as Jacques took out his teeth, we saw the old toothless carnivore that had become his earth, begging every cow for her dung before she vanished into the vast quarry.
You will not kill he said to me
You will bury what you killed in the bowl of your feet he told me
You will coif a hill with your remains he told me
So they may feed your descendants’ earth
And all was written on your sides
To form the chain of our subjection
Far from any abundance you might have been
Your skull’s summit
The sum of my words
Like so many chains
I close my eyes
To open them no more
But I don’t know it
When I know it, yours are already closed
I have no more mirror
To cross
One by one I tear off your fingers, I burn your hair
One by one, I prick your skins, I put out your eyes
But you persist
In what continues to be said in me
As if to say
Each is the depository of his life
I am
What is left
Of each one’s death
Once more, you said cloud
And new flesh took flight
Over your words
With nothing being new in you
With nothing renewing itself
And the flesh, leadened by your words
Began to fall
Like flakes onto the page
Flakes of snow. Flakes of rage.
And it was
The word’s despair
Soon my father will hear no more
Soon he will be no more what I heard of him
Soon I will have stopped hearing what he was
To become
A future in suspension
But what will I do with the mouths, with the noses I fill with words
Without knowing how to free myself
From this aftertaste of languages.
That, is nothing
That, is a cherry on the head of this good-for-nothing
That, I will not say. I will not touch it
Once, I came out of a pencil
And the pencil was happy
I could make myself very pointed
And what I wrote on an eraser
I could erase with another
I could arrange my words in a staircase
to touch the snow on your head
I didn’t have to tell anybody
not even W who made it a point of honour
not to allow himself to write
But I found him so many forms that it made him dizzy
I forgot the dot on the I on purpose to perch there
and eye people who passed nearby
even if I learned nothing
of what you will later be
but no matter, I will carry on
so that every word might see itself
in the mirror
on the other side
and even if I’m never sure
that the mirror might not become
a trap
and bolt us in
on each side
I tarry in colours
In ropes that would spell out words
Words that would shadow breasts and dead bodies
That you let partner the indolent sleeper
Who cannot choose between dream and nightmare
Something does not know itself
Something does not sever itself from what knows
From what is silent
From what persists in being silent
From what vanishes in the telling
Of this dream that does not happen
That would not know how to happen
While the fire feeds itself still on what it touches
You will be unable even to revive the course of this leaf through the breach in this beast
Or retrace this web’s thread to the hole of the spider that’s always spawning
You will be unable even to attach this fly’s wings and sit with the hungering spider to sample other offal
You will be unable even to emerge from what’s possible and view a vista of impossibilities
Unable even to escape your head and go to deep in this hollow to see if each woman’s sex harbours a sleeping god
/
A spider passes by to see if I’m alive
It plucks off an ant from my body
I crumble one of my limbs and bury them
so no road will lead
from their tread unto my days
A root blends with my hair
to feed who knows what fowl
overflying my house
I seize the first I can reach and pluck it
To cut the circulation between my head and the beyond
Quick as any mouth can spawn a thought
Who will shut it down
To do away
With every paunch
What might my climbing hand find
Hot piss or a freshwater spring
Clear cut mountains or
Reforested tummies
Never knowing what chasms begat us
She is beautiful the mountain like a rebel that will be devoured by fire
She is a rebel the mountain like a beauty wanting to free herself from the embrace that would devour her
She is beautiful the mountain like a rebel stripped of her flesh
She is a rebel the mountain like a beauty who falters before falling into the sentinels’ fire
An apple one will bite into
To its death’s core
I try to persuade myself that we are going west, while itfeels as if I’m headed east. I try to imagine the sun setting before me though it stays stubbornly behind. To put the south in the north though the north persists in being south. I try to imagine a peaceful immersion in the wide water while we run to flatten ourselves against the cliffs of the great mountain. And we load up for the crossing. With cow hooves, goat dances, blonde hair, greying temples. Hoping to flatten it out if it’s the great mountain, to drain it dry if it’s the wide water, so that no one will know what his future will hold
I’ve remained with this same barrel hung from my neck
Since I seek a rope to cut
I find no more ropes round my neck
That bind me to who knows what remains
But look, you ask the lady a question
She takes off her ears to reply
she puts them back on
she’s nice to you
she turns pages without making noise
she listens to her head without making noise
she separates her hair from yours, without making noise
she stuffs her head with sounds and cries without making noise
she removes her head from your breath without making noise
she sets her fingers down on your silence, without making noise
you let her disappear
without having understood her noise
/
But how to have a hand touch mine
With passion
Before this small cloud
Vanishes over the horizon