Tr. Carlos Lara
from 600 DOORS (1992)
THIS ORIGINAL SPLIT, ITS MODES
approaching flagstone, evading
even chiaroscuro that would
forge it, equal to a unifying
distance.
under strobe-like obsession
the thorn reveals in the brush
the rasp of the cane.
the same as what has left us
the perfume accuses childless
profundities of swallowing
space.
***
I ABANDON BLINKING MEMORY.
implied house and bridge,
though I never touch but the stain
of sound, the spinning anonymity
of the cobra, of the soul stirred
by a tune that stuns.
heard among the plants
the pan of time decays:
offering a gift of specific
consistency? eccentric animal
eclipsed by the phantasmal fire
that breathes.
islands leap toward chemistry
erasing transverse light: it seemingly
threatens, but process
the consistency and its murmur. before
birth, temples
of pregnant corrosion.
***
THE CHARACTER OF THE SCALE
of this, skinless, what seems
important, the reel pulses, for
meters, the swell of a chromatic stertor.
throwing up the reflection of diamond death
dressed in absence, diminishing
upon the touch of mute distance.
where does it carry penumbra,
all that destiny at the edge?
softening the sea murmur, that oscillating
conscience of noon between the poplars.
from THE CURVE OF THE ECHO (1998/reissued 2008)
SCRIPT
Reality is supreme lightning
before which we are forced to close our eyes.
MYSTERY OF THE TORAH
The lightning that illuminates looks.
GASTON BACHELARD
1
if happiness assumes your silence
no frontier can reach you
if you behold yourself where you are
barefoot when your secret
movement becomes space
and in sleeplessness life returns you:
you’ll mature to scar yourself Are yourself art yourself
and this zigzagged bridge will bear fortune
even in death that opens
a blinking eye you are as if you never
were
2
nocturnal animals will usher you
across the border
you ask oblivion laughing how
3
your outspread ghost brushes past you a dream
in which you leave the cradle of duration
in which you eat of nonexistent fruit
∞
The lightning gives rise to the horizon, expanding its ephemerality to shorten, or at the very least, mislead it. Lost in the desire for permanence: even the horizon attains the dissipation of calmness in duration.
At dusk, elusive voices drift through the smallest of windows –the medium. We pass blindly, submersed in the dialogical monotony of a prison building its own walls. With inexhaustible fatigue it rambles on.
Then the heat of that inscrutable litany breaks, or settles. –Forms of laughter; while in existence, disappear…– the glass spills, the continent ruptures. Space vanishes; the illusion of a path was a wild dream.
Will the persistent hacking of intent –intention, better–, obstruct the streaks of difference in the air? As a prisoner of language, I can forge whole universes of premonition.
But a rainbow surfaces. Was there before we had perceived it. Had always been, where lightning is sown, offering a split dispersion of hues. Transparency, that swoops down with definitive lightness, that cannot be verified.
Voices, colors are reminiscences. The unheard-of sound, the invisible declaration? Transparency, as it allows for sight, cannot tolerate consistency.
The medium dispersed: the light did not proceed. It was my love, honed on the rainbow that neither presages nor exposes anything but streaks of color, magnetized to each another. There transparency is seen, and the route unravels, enveloping material, routine, rutilant.
The attraction of the abyss is like the call of a vegetal angel. Living tissues that contradict one another.
Below, the lake reveals its secret.
On a boulder, we draw wings in the distance.
Feathered outcrop of rock.
Horizon hovering.
To follow a path whose steps, neither human nor animal, plot its insistence.
Reverence on the precipice.
The whole murmur spreads. A frozen spring melts into the lake. We drink. Waters converge, transmutation.
We stay silent for the sky. Infinite insects filter our flesh. Our laughs ferment like magma, and the clouds transport every question. There will be no stares as evening falls.
Night descends to the depth of the instant. Now, outside the hour. To follow a path that promises nothing more than wonder. In one form or another, the anticipation of death.
Across the clearing, between the rustling foliage, damp debris: an opening waits. Its movement is expectancy. Its love is a pyre. Its light is a formless sphere, or unbelievable song. It tastes like everything you’ve lost, like that which you’ll return to lose again. It breaks your grasp, aligns your shadow with a brief collapse into the abyss. The abyssal, level calm is the hidden calling.
The abyss is silent.
Ancestors appear, devoured by metamorphosis. We continue in the trail’s dust. Oblivion becomes equanimous when released from both dust and trail.
To more closely approach to a certain zone of the forest, we take ourselves deep into audition. What we hear does not have a reason for being. It’s unfastened from memory, from adherence, from property, from power, from inventory. We must abide an instant in immanence to breathe the premonition of the forest. The ancient branches dry out around the base, but in the topmost part the dew is permanent. How do we stop perceiving silence, the slanted certainty that all the foliage is one whole? Everything up to now has been heard, being heard hushes.
We infiltrate the old cattle trail. Walking with tranquility, caring less for the edge of certitude. A cicada sounds off like a bell, tries to shake the foundations of the world. But suddenly it deadens –we are passing. A realm of enchanted ferocities, of simultaneous times.
If the path abandoned itself, abandoned its own origin –as this implicit stream obviates–, would it not so much usurp the assertion of a journey like the consolation or complacency of an objective? Would it not drive toward the unknowable –unapprenticeship of the feeling of movement, as if space were still beyond the being that comprehends it?
Beyond existence, on the path that leaves itself, the unknown is recognized.
A tree whose trunk seven people could embrace. The awareness of space changes with each step
–awareness that is space– until melting in the hidden presence where everything passes in a sidelong glance, beyond the capture of focus. We’re far from home, but at home. We’re outside of home, but homeward bound. The path does not have a destiny. The cicada continues in our confined revelation; a wild turkey buzzes in flight, even with consciousness.
Yellow elder in bloom. To be unreachable, celestial, drinking in the branches a unified stillness… the clandestine, what bellows in a closed off world… what erases precincts of discernment… and to be the turquoise aperture of fire… the other side on the other side…
We remove our shoes to climb better among the boulders. Our fingers instantly perceive their refined senselessness. They absorb the heat and humidity of centuries, ancient palms once again devoted to the estimation of a path.
The barefoot learn to look with skill. A path is the speech of bare feet.
Myriads of leaves, twigs, have fallen to the ground, sinking into night’s bog. The dust augurs its immortality beyond all things born.
And this sinuous felicity that we call the path, is it made only of unforeseen casualties, hardly real in its imminence? Does the conscience only surge forth straight for the infinite, when it disappears?
Lightning lacks capacity, is a god that does not accord. Absorbed in the blood and forever lost to memory, or forgetfulness. Impregnation of the god. Metamorphosis in the god. Is life sensational, and not significant? Imprescriptible, lightning scalds your insides in self-recognition.
Clarities traverse. The penumbra of the crackling foliage does not imply inner darkness and outer brilliance, but the dissolvency of a certain intensity in secret illumination. As something illuminates –that is the secret. Who was truly not willing to lose oneself who opened oneself?
A return to the heart attracts the swift spirits of thoroughness in its increate leap.
As the path carries you, lightning eclipses you. If love illuminates you, it’s the recollection of your other side. Inherence of the path; its surprising expansion in chains of brilliance and the jangling bracelets of memory.
But the forest does not want to exist.
We pursue the echo that precedes us. How to touch a faceless god –a rumored god? How to caress the lightning? Where the rock protrudes in Galapagos vertigo, we listen… will the lightning strike once more?
To observe the ground while walking: abandoning oneself to the counsel of the current. At the most strict equidistance, the elusive center of the heart. No ambiguity; not even oblivion, which induces a similar flux. The naked path. To follow it (where?), teaches the minuteness of the dream.
An exodus from time would not be without the body we enter.
∞
4
are you not that fly brushing past you
and the gravel underfoot?
5
you’ve reached your unbound end
hearing the air shift
the light tunic of Spring