What was that world that had an oak at its center
and teeth scattered around it?
Pieces of bark gather one by one in the word
tree, but by themselves they are solitudes.

“Autumn Song”

 

I thought that surviving the storm would win you a spot in this world. Yeah, I know I was wrong, I even told you in a poem—remember?—that fragment from a now anchorless place. We were saying how a broken body can only be imagined in chiaroscuro. But then it was our turn, to see for ourselves. That mystery of fixed shadows soaked with blood, where the fickle thing was light. We listened as a ruminant chewed grass on the other side of the wall. Night must have been falling when we heard a fire, the creak of felled timber, and the pitter-patter of flames that, before long, roared like a whale. That was the poem, and that was the room where, the first time we saw each other naked, we witnessed the dead up close. Like a hallucination: it was our family. We didn't leave at the same time. When I opened the door, the green of sown seeds framed the world like a mouth frames the egress of a voice. On that field of emerald grass, the whole poem fled, a bird knocked down by a bullet. That’s what I thought, and maybe you thought the same: a word outside its paradise, outside its habitat, a word in exile, can’t be sung. You tore up the letter and left. On that sown field, I knew I had no cow that might resemble a bird, no songs to lick my wounds, and that if I only closed my eyes, I’d hear a chirp. Holy, holy, holy. And the third is a bird that has poked a hole the sky with its beak. I had to get out of there, in a hurry, I had to board the train. At the threshold of the stairs, like the opening of a fleshy mouth, lay a vagrant, half-naked, maybe dead. The clouds huddled into orange cells. My daughter called, Look! Look up! And I saw it, and maybe you saw it, too, and the next day we saw it all in the papers, with the word phenomenon in the headline. Descending the stairs, we became a blind man’s dream. Ancestrally broken, he sleeps because he misses seeing... Look there! A lamb in the road, bleating, the sound trailing from its throat to the throat where the train is coming, to the throat where the train is coming. Bleating bleeds, though it’s a voice; a voice that’s a drink, though it’s made of words. Look over there! The flock, the flock locked together in the snowy luster of wool, the light of a train like an underground moon. We found you on the platform, and though tragedy was imminent, I saw your face, the face of a deer, doe eyes. Outside it finally rained and soothed the long thirst in the sown fields, but a journey awaited. We wanted to save the flock, and I told you about the poet. As I spoke, we watched him walk through the fields around his house, and we saw how the lamb was trampled, unavoidably, by gray hogs. The same lamb that had just brushed past his legs. The force of hungry hogs is tremendous, I told you how I’d read that, and you, powerless, with definite tenderness, gave me your hand and, like that, we waited for the train. I know that in a country of knives, it would have come to no more than a chorus of squeals, the stridulation of teeth, an ordinary story, the news of a few deaths on a badly tuned radio. But for us, love, it was a song, and at the same time, the song’s most intimate secret, its body of snow about to melt, its body of a girl. Soon, on the road, blood spilled from the lambs, from the terrified flock that was bleating, bleating...even so, it was a song that serenaded us, and at the same time, our interlaced hands. A ballad and bleating that won’t be split by bullet, because they’re being dreamed at that very wounded minute.