Time urges me to enter
your house at the dawn
of extreme passion
to bring you my offerings the
questions' flame and the lute
I am language of mourning
oh Ishtar and death eats my arm
I don't know how on your forehead
to raise the veil of forgetting
silence suddenly multiplies
among the times that own my fears
You, you hide over there
behind the stones' measure
You have pronounced neither negation
nor clouds
Is this the path
where depth is the wind of a mute thickness
Grass and loam
I kneel so that the palms of your hands
may wake up against remembrance's windows' whiteness
A sky perhaps Shards of melodies
I thought had come from the valley
return of the writings that hide their loneliness from me
They shake my fingers
at night
The secret keeps getting darker
distancing itself from the palm trees
always distancing itself

The wanderers' cries the voice's bend
resound more loudly in the desert
than the echo of knocks
on doors Moaning breaths and
tombstones grow in the letters
black blotch that which remains
of the light's radiance
Dragged along
Torn apart
Bleeding he hallucinates
from all the blood that stops in the song's throat
The dunes hide their dawn in their folds
The dung heap of pains
encircles a tomb
tombs
I will not lend my prayer
My face searches for the air in the dew of stones
because I have a body over there
near you
Blood
My blood's prayer

Translated by Pierre Joris.