FROM PRAYERS FOR AN ABSENT GOD
That’s why I became a poet
because time passes slowly in solitude.
Isn’t it merely a dangerous moment
maintains our composure?
Doesn't madness depend
on our single, fragile chord?
Doesn’t she lean on one term alone,
on the exact term,
that saves
or damns us?
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That poet who stares at me.
Every night
he leaves class,
explains a verse,
shoos the flies away from the water fountain,
drinks a sip,
shakes off his blue jeans.
And he keeps doing this, always
sad,
concise.
Sometimes
the audience cheers,
and he searches his pockets,
sinking his forehead into the theater box
while I think:
Him
and the blank page.
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I remain, staring at the word,
the ruins my first verse began,
only things speaking themselves forever and never,
there will be no more talent emerging from the fragments,
only the others’ letters announce a disaster.
+++
IT IS TUESDAY
It is Tuesday
I read Kristeva
(“melancholia is sterile
if it does not become a poem”)
It is Tuesday
and a month ago
my left hand
burned in living flesh.
I met a doctor
whom I loved madly.
That man washed
my blood
that man cleaned
my burned skin
with indulgence.
That man met
my weeping
but that weeping
was not a weeping
that came from within
it was a different
weeping,
an outside weeping.
It is Tuesday
I read Kristeva:
(“I inhabit the secret
crypt of a wordless
pain”)
To him I dedicate
“Love can surge from
pain, the deepest
love.”
It is Tuesday
and I read Kristeva:
“Melancholia is
a perversion,
it is up to us
to guide it into
words and life”
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WHEN THE GOVERNMENT FALLS
When the government falls
I will be habitually alone.
Since I will have postponed
the errands
—as always—
from taking so much time
to imagine you,
my pantry will be
empty
and I will wander without
a grain of bread,
or relatives, or neighbors
or painkillers, alone.
I will be a woman in a
country at war
who thinks of you
habitually
—alone—
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