Poetry

“.. and in the morning, he spread the juice of that grass on his feet, went down to the sea,
walked upon it for nights and days observing with amazement
 frightening and marvelous things as well as rare ones, nor did he stop walking on the surface of the water”
(The Thousand and One Nights, from the story of Hasib Karim Ad-Din)

Descending with me from a distant March.
It fills my hands. In the weightless sun.
Inside the holes of the ant-hill. Made welcome.
In the drops of dew. I swim.
In the saintly marsh of bird excrement.
Pedaling away on the gravel road. In the light.
In the peach fuzz of emerging buds.
Lizards flailing their tails on the side of the road. In the green.
Clouds drying up  in white puddles.
The call and the voice of one’s own thoughts.
In the mud, sky, light. Pedaling.
Pedaling on. Joyously. Salivating
and salivating as I climb. With the cyclamens.
Yesterday it rained. Yesterday it was. I gave.
Light rings me, sprinkles me. Lends me voice.
Dances me in an empty, dead twig.
A hermit’s cane. Lightweight.
Silence next to a yellow crocus.
Wheat stacks. On the ground. Ground. Here.
In the woods. Behind the heart.
In front of your eyes. Here…where…beyond
In the meridian cutting across the trees. Next to it…Beyond.
And where in this chaos of oblivion? In a hall of mirrors.
On the trunks. Just like the dream calls for.
Sewing up the hole of the great void.
Spreading shadows on my hands. Carved up on the
face of their geography. You chase  me, self-assured.
Perhaps you desire me, in your supple vacuousness.
Happy like butterflies, sisters in April’s early warmth
Oh, come back. Come. The thinking soul . The loving soul.
Soul  willing  to confront . Soul with its pulse
beat inventing  the quiet and infinite light of silence,
on the white rocks that smell like thyme
up, up there, while oaks touched me
like herbivores grazing
 
 
I was opening my lungs to spring
among smells and bird whistles. 
There, where the water swept me down river.
My eyes were thinking of a possible future.
How to invent it. In the human  time of all.
While I was slithering like a coluber
among the possible answers offered by the light
penetrating among the trees. On the uninterrupted page
between  page and existence.
Aspiring to the void as the rotting
cane was beating on the ground.  Reaching silence.
Hunting for the last answers.
 
 
Those who had glanced at the problem of life earlier
couldn’t tell what it was made of.
Maybe of living. Maybe of those fragrances.
Maybe of  lichens growing.
Maybe of the weakness of one’s arm.
Maybe of the premonition of fullness in the void.
So that emptiness was the only tutor around.
That’s why I was seeking out the woods
where voices speak in absence.
Doggedly insisting in the din of an interrupted buzz.
In that illusory murmuring, the crocus would finally open its eyes.
Before screaming out cosmoses and infinities.
 
 
This is why you were born, it repeated to me many a  time.                
Just take a few whiffs and here you are.
You find your footing. You find your pace.
The grace of life regained.
To give a name to things once again.
In everybody’s eyes. In  yours
from which you can re-open the closed door
and flee the systematic conspiracy of silence
and collusion where the only extreme form of existence
is consumption. A plan for assassinating - killing, suicide.
A mass grave for everyone. A whole gamut of gas chambers.
 
 
And to look at the world from that hole.
Without a life other than that one.
Without a thought other than those ones.
Those and only those crossword puzzles
sticky as glue meant to capture mice. The horror. Brutality.
For those who are inside and cannot change.  Alone with the others.
With all those you meet.          
There, where the others can not and know not.
Evil besieges you, animal outside your pack
Individuals degenerated into solitary entities.
To avoid being sucked in , all you have left is exhaustion.
For our obligations to being which we cannot transfer.
A plea to get back  into our skin and think.
Each one glued to their own personal news-cast.
With conspiracies of silence laid out in a confused game
of lights and shadows suspending  the truth within us.
 
 
Remembering a return, one afternoon
under a luminous sky
the sudden joy of existence in a warm wanderlust
among all things useless and rare
that are found in the human castoff
as you walk along a stone wall
and in the dream of a duration
that gives you birth over and over again
always in the same place and in different places
earth, water, sky, light, breath, flesh, love of place.
In your eyes what your ears hold, what is held by your hands.
What the earth is. Origin in the process of sprouting.
 
 
Language. Languages. Shores. Voices. The closeness and distance of exile.
To disappear and re-appear.
To silence oneself , to take the shape of a hull as you cool down.
And in the voyage a burnt color that tries to make it through.
To heal. To bring with it a birth.
The infinite calling out to us.
Inhabiting us and carrying on. To leave so you can come back.
To listen so you can hear.  To return so you can give yourself a voice.
This is wealth of  places.
The undreaming dream sews
together the tale.
Under a clearer sky the wait for a return.
Here and in each elsewhere. Beyond any  boundary of oblivion.
 
 
Awareness hits you: You must negate history
perculating in the colliquation of a single color.
Faces. Landscapes. Civilizations. Cultures. Resemblances.
You must start from scratch again: Lands with lands. Shores with shores.
With infinite patience. To understand what we are.
Take your bedraggled sock,  turn it inside out in the sea
and rinse it out again and again. To be born again knowing
that you must lose. Lose once more. Outside of steel-works
ports and orange groves razed to the ground. While athletes
rush, pick up speed, get worked up with sadistic mockery.
Like Orpheus with Eurydice you must not look back.
Understand that the essence of things is nothing else but the courage to do them.
So as not to give respite to the void, respond to the game
with beauty. Start over from yourself each time.
Because there is no other solution when commodities
along the borders are handled with care
while humans are the cheapest and most useless of merchandise.
That’s why they lay the barbed wire to fence off
whole continents guilty
of starving along with their kids.
Immense concentration camps of sorrow headed by puppets
in the service of powerful Westerners.
Legal, moderate, liberal  powers to suck
oil coffee diamonds pieces of lungs
and cast the poor remains into the sea.
Leave them festering with new diseases
get the nuisance over right then and there, prevent
a suffering homo sapiens sapiens
from propagating all over the place, as it has done for millennia.