The Density of the Being

We sit close together on the bedside carpet

the piano reaps pearls from the sea shell grit

my love your sparkling body

leans against my armpit like a ponderous sword

now it’s dormant as if it were dead − gentle, forever unmapped

since many long hours must elapse

until the renewed rains of lust gush forth

through the flesh

now it’s dormant as if it were dead

like a fish enslaved from too much struggle

though not flung on the sand, no way !

but in the water, in its very natural environment

this must be the much-coveted death

in all likelihood the sweetest death

the extinction

precisely where you draw your power, still absorbing it

so that you wouldn’t perish from self-estrangement, from the void,

but from self-devoration

from the density of your own being

unable to breathe any further.

Two Suns

Each day I climb up the stairs of an immense building

severely guarded by two suns

I seek you from one room into another

yet another − never the same − sun

invariably whips both of us with rods

it cruelly whips our fingers with a rod

Each evening I climb down in the murky park

(for some time now I have been thinking

that only the gloomy realm is animate

yet I trip over the day’s deceptive litter

crinkling wrappers cigarette butts

even the lake looks like cellophane

however I once came across a hedgehog

a loving easy-to-deceive animal

it was making his bedding nest by itself

amid tree roots on some dried stalks

like a miraculous handful of sunbeams

ever since I have been praying for poverty and innocence

English version by Gabriela PACHIA