Where is your saviour?
Where is the one who will destroy all books,
who will hoist you back upon the horse
and send you galloping?
Where is he?
Spiders weave their webs
Spiders weave their webs
among the dead beams
of old houses.
They do not weave them to hunt
but to keep those houses
from collapsing,
to hold upright
what abandonment would have
fall to the ground.
Hypotheses, p. 45
There are so many who would wish to keep silent
There are so many who would wish to keep silent,
but they live always being asked
about everything, by a voice
that is neither in them nor outside,
and they cannot help answering
in a tongue they do not understand
with words they do not understand.
Everything is in perpetual movement
Everything is in perpetual movement.
Nothing repeats itself.
Identity is a piece of sophistry
fit for stubborn spirits.
But listen to the footsteps of all
that moves. Be still — do you not hear
the ceaseless murmur of the void?
We have walked on tiptoe
We have tiptoed
over the piled-up bodies.
None of them raised a hand
to grasp us by the ankle
and remind us of the mists
of their native shores.
The world goes on beyond words
The world goes on beyond words,
but words too go on beyond the world,
toward the clashing abyss of meaninglessness.
Can we tear through their spider’s web
and fly like the bird of prey whose gaze
pierces the distance?
The Great Public
To write for plain men,
for tacky women,
for people who are mad for the crockery
of the great department stores,
for scholars who flatter and buy
the philosopher Wojtyła
or any other humanist on the back cover.
Sometimes enthusiasm comes to our door
Sometimes enthusiasm comes to our door
and sees the sombre ash of our breathing.
Then it does not know whether to enter or to let
us wither away into sleep.
There will be a tomorrow, it seems to think,
a tomorrow of hesitant footsteps
Ode to the Idiots
The idiots know many things.
Let us beg of them the nectar
that God, in his image and likeness,
presses for us.
Let us hear from them the law
that gathers all in sentences
perfect and complete.
I hold in the dawn of my half-light
I hold in the dawn of my half-light
your swollen light;
your mute eyes spill over
and tumble down the slope
of the void.
All that the body can love
All that the body can love
is made of touches and vibrations.
All that can be the object of our desire
is a breaking murmur against the walls.
Light pierces them, and nothing in life
knows emptiness or stillness. Nothing denies us;
Treatise on Absolute Poetry
The mass is made of glyphs.The glyphs bore through air or earth,never through fire or water.The glyphs conceal fire or water,never air or earth.The poet, with the hammer of his hands,upon the forge of his chest,will beat the mass until the laymen say:That is a form that admits nourishment,a bowl, a jar, a chalice… We Are Wellspring, p. 47
Drought
The merchant came and saw
that nothing was left in the marketplace —
that the stalls were empty, that there were no
vases, flutes, carpets, or jewels;
that there were not even stalls, only desert.
They were all saying: it does not matter to us, we know no thirst.
But the merchant still knew it, so he took a shortcut
and brought the inner rain to a halt,
The Secret of the Tartar
Look:
these peoples are used to being laid waste —
they pitch their tents across the plain, out to the horizon,
and they lie down under the sun to wait for the Tartar.
What are they doing in their prostration?
When I had a job
When I had a job I went to by bus
every morning,
one of my fantasies was to get off
at any of the intermediate stops
and never arrive —
How can we fail to feel the press of so many people
How can we fail to feel the press of so many people
each morning. We feel them
in the belly
and at the crown
of the head
Between everything being free
Between everything being free
and nothing being so
lies the whole of the ocean.
And if the extremes touch,
perhaps it is the same thing to spend
one’s existence peeling banknotes
off the body with every act
as to walk across the asphalt
Seventh Deed (fragment)
How small is all the vastness of childhood
when its scent on the chest is of first fields,
of wet grass,
salted flowers,
plaits of mud,
bread of hands…
Physics of the Road
I always walk barefoot
and the world is an eternal beach of damp sands
where there is no sea and no land,
only the part in which both lap at each other
like newly-wedded dogs.
It is their tongues that erase my footsteps
just after they have been uttered.
Second Deed (fragment)
I see you!
Rosy gates,
rotund blazons waving like cyclones,
mundane vapours pouring en masse into the earth.
I arrive upon the infinite donkey that descends the cliffs.
The fields of poetry
The fields of poetry
are of arid exuberance.
In that exile, beneath the absolute sun,
we the blind walk in the sharp-edged
shadow of the word.
To love, like war, leaves behind
To love, like war, leaves behind
devastations in seed,
exuberant fields,
solitudes that grow
wild and unusual.