SMALL POEMS IN PROSE
The sun closed, the sense of the sun closed, the sense of the closing
was illuminated.
A day arrives in which poetry is made without language, day in which the
great and small desires scattered in the verses are called together, suddenly
gathered in two eyes, the same ones I praised so much in the frantic absence
of the blank page.
In love with the words that create small nights in the uncreated part
of day and its fierce emptiness.
PORTRAIT OF VOICES
To my grandmother, Princess Dounia
Fedora Kolikovska, whom I beg to pardon
my lack of interest in magin and my exces-
sive adherence to the samovar.
At dawn I will sleep with my doll in my arms, my doll with gold blue eyes,
the one with a tongue as wonderful as a poem for your shadow. "Doll, little
character, who are you?"
"I'm not so little. It's you who are too big."
"What are you?"
"I am an I, and this, which seems little, is enough for a doll."
Little marionette of good luck, she writhes in my window according to
what the wind wants. The rain has soaked her dress, her face and her hands,
which lose their color. But she still has her ring, and with it her power.
In the winter she knocks on the glass with her little feet in blue shoes
and dances, dances for joy, for the cold, dances to warm her heart, her
wooden heart, her heart of good luck. In the night she raises her pleading
arms and at will creates a small night lit by the moon.
POEM FOR THE FATHER
And it was then
that with a dead and cold tongue in his mouth
he sang the song they didn't let him sing
in this owrld of obscene gardens and of shadows
that came at the wrong time to remind him
of songs from his boyhood
in which he couldn't sing the song he wanted to sing
the song they didn't let him sing
except through his absent mouth
through his absent voice.
Then from the highest tower of absence
his song echoes in the opacity of the hidden
in the silent extension
full of shifting hollows like the words I write.
ON A POEM BY RUBEN DARIO
In memoriam L.C.
to Marguerite Duras and to
Francesco Tentori Montalto
Seated at the bottom of a lake.
She has lost her shadow,
not the desire to live, to lose.
She is alone with her images.
Dressed in red, she doesn't look.
Who has arrived to this place
where no one ever arrives?
The lord of deaths in red.
The man masked by his expressionless face.
The one who arrived to find her
takes her away without himself.
Dressed in black, she looks.
She who never knew to die for love and because of that
learned nothing.
She is sad because she is not here.
THE UNDERSTANDING
Let us begin by saying that Shadow had died. Did Shadow know that Shadow
had died? Undoubtedly. Shadow and she were associates for years. Shadow
was her only executrix, her only friend and the only one who dressed in
mourning for Shadow. Shadow was not so terribly bereaved by the sad event
and the day of the burial she celebrated it with a banquet.
Shadow didn't erase the name of Shadow. The firm was known under the trade
name "Shadow and Shadow." Sometimes the new clients called Shadow Shadow;
but Shadow answered to both names, as if she, Shadow, were in effect Shadow,
who had died.