Re-learn the world
anew:
brief burst of sun revealed
in a swan,
a mermaid harmonising the universe
Only the wind succumbs
to the excess of light,
and only the wind,
a lute in blue,
slowly repeats the same sound:
It doesn't matter where I am
I don't need a traveller's
map
Your fingers marked
the subtlest route over my body
and their timeless
topographic curve
stayed there, like a smile, or the mouth
of a nameless river
It doesn't matter where I am:
this line of firs or pine trees
sloping softly,
lightly, towards the sea,
can be everything
It can even bring the swan
from the line above
and place it here, on this one,
now,
or disorganise one third
of the mermaid and turn her
into an island infused
with whatever peace
It doesn't matter where
I am
They say the Greeks
knew five ways to talk
of love.
We only know one, which cannot contain
the near paradox
of love being all we know of love
and nothing else
It would be good to have, in the verse,
all those ways, all those words
close at hand: a brief dictionary
that might know all inner
landscapes
Not to resist time
I don't know if the Greeks had several
ways to talk of death,
or even if love
has borrowed some of those ways
for its self-definition
There is literature that speaks of what is
upstream from love,
but it's not - eros, thanatos,
their connection, their being-between-
being
But all that is known
is repeated in the path of the mermaid,
her enigma
transfigured into the swan
They say the swan only sings
when it's dying.
But we need to organise the wind
so as to paint its speed
in a deeper blue
I ask the wind for a sound
an image
as bright and dazzled
as the ones I have
in front of me
No answer from the wind though,
implausible that it should speak
The route you marked remains,
however, and my body
recognises the touch
of your fingers
Where is that which is depicted
in verse,
in the midst of all this?
Where are all the words
hiding?
I know I need a new way,
a new word
for the frame, or the colour
learning through
seeing is
what I'm missing now
- only the sun is left,
shedding light on the very spot
where a traveller's map is useless
All else: invented
more than three thousand years
ago, among temples and stairways where
disobedient disciples sat
I resort to the lute,
- but only the verse speaks,
answering me
Rhyming lines, fiery
circles, fragments inundating
already written words
I stamp this sea, on all of them
and dream these are the words.
In the morning of this sun,
I see them thus,
knowing them for the time they hold,
almost sacred temples where I paint
the day in colours,
inherited from a thousand generations
In tradition of no travel,
they are the only
point of resistance
Everything else: an invention,
moulded and remoulded,
centuries multiplied a hundred
times
More than four thousand years
into this new era,
and nothing is new under
this sun
Perhaps only this
abyss.
On the map, do I disrupt
the precipice?
The trace of your fingers,
a route that nearly harbours mermaid,
lute, time,
on this route
- I suspend it
Translation by Ana Hudson