Wheel With a Single Spoke (13 page)

about the human, before a human.

A human was not born so will not die.

He is eternal and forever

because he takes all depositions

about that which exists.

A human has never existed and will never exist

because nonexistence is its own witness.

And still, a human, human, human

is one who does not believe

who did not believe

who we did not believe

would ever learn to die.

I eat dragonflies because they're green

with black eyes,

because they have two sets of wings,

transparent wings,

because they fly without making noise,

because I don't know who made them

or why,

because they are beautiful and gentle,

because I don't know why they're beautiful and gentle,

because they don't talk and because

I'm not completely sure that's true.

I eat dragonflies because I don't like

the taste,

because they are noxious and

don't sit well.

I eat dragonflies because I don't understand them,

I eat them because I live at the same time they do,

I eat them because once I tried to eat myself,

my hands first,

and they were infinitely more disgusting,

I eat them because I tried

to eat my tongue,

my own fleshy tongue,

and I was terrified when I saw

it spit out words.

They were green with black eyes,

and far from me, and hungry.

Without me, it is impossible – proof that I am.

Without me, it was impossible;

proof: I pulled myself out of myself,

that is, from that me that was.

I am he without whom it is impossible.

I am he without whom it was impossible.

I am he who gave a deposition

on God's existence.

I am he who gave a deposition

on God's nonexistence, because

I made God visible.

I am made by God, because

I made God.

I am neither good nor bad,

I just am.

I am the word “am.”

I am the ear that hears “am.”

I am the spirit that understands “am.”

I am the absurd body of “am”

and its letters.

I am the place where “am” exists

and the bed where it sleeps.

Many of them, for various reasons

all living together below the floor,

mixed together, becoming enemies

of death,

some dying of old age

or simply

killing themselves.

From time to time, someone

rents a reason.

I myself lived inside a reason

of this kind, but after a while

I wandered off.

There were so many. From time to time,

in the common grave where they died

they left bones behind, much more beautiful

than I could have imagined.

Now I have climbed up. Sometimes I am

able to think even at the level of the moon.

And still I long, like I can't take any more,

to throw myself into the chimney, come out through the fireplace,

and lie spread over the floor for hours on end

with my ear pressed to the joists.

Occasionally, instead of grassblades

there are idols, green and thin.

Horses circumambulate in wonder

and swarms of ants . . .

They glisten at night like blades

threatening the stars and moon.

The horses run on gravel to the river.

No more ants are seen, not one.

Grassblades for an unborn horse

Only in the future will it eat them.

I have seen them, yes, I have,

but I surrendered before them.

I prepare for a great tree,

the one that is nothing but a smell,

I turn the nostrils of dusky

fruits toward the hunted vegetable.

I strip off my bark and rings

down to my rising osmotic sap.

Monday is an apple, Tuesday a pear, and Wednesday

a bitter grape.

Autumn falls. A kind of yellow

arrives, and rust. The tree

drops its hours. Seconds faint

within clusters of grapes.

Let's have a drink, not wine, but a sour,

early fermentation, let's bind the mouths

of hunting dogs with raffia, so they

will take the zenith in their snouts.

One nostril stuck beside the next

wedded like the tubes of a pan-flute

and you play what runs through them –

the smell of fruit.

Air currents, running unseen

through the unseen,

the pressure of emptiness on emptiness.

The awkwardness of birds forced

to move their nerves wrapped

in feathers.

Tall animals, sleeping

on tenuous air.

They poke their beaks out

of the atmosphere, in waves.

Here are spheres, but very

far apart.

They want to leap up

but cannot

that belowness –

up above, unexisting,

Quiet. We prepare for something else.

I was enclosed in my own capsule.

My heart worked well, and

I would have slept behind it,

accustomed as I was to the irregular thumps

of interior time.

But my every second was measured out

and I had no patience left,

not even

enough to write one letter down.

If I had died, I would have been good dead,

a hero, even.

Everything I had done rocked to and fro

in the quiet battle of the stars.

I hung from a hook of fate.

Red holidays ran from my throat . . .

But look, they came

and took me from the capsule.

They invited my soul to exist

anywhere I liked, except my body.

And the liberated soul suddenly

had time,

it brought the bird-loud tree to light,

it was blanched by the moon.

It would have liked to become a sphere,

but it found its own body as disgusting

as Noah's putrid ark.

It got lazy, took on angels,

doubted the reality of fate.

O unhappy character!

You should have stayed in myth

locked in by things that happen

and kept yourself for yourself, just enough

to sleep and dream

the unclear light of your birth.

 

O music, you vibration

most rare

because we will never

leap over our ears.

O smells, you wonders

because my heart may travel

toward childhood

through your tunnel.

O colors, you deceit

of light.

O words, you words,

I stretch out behind you

constantly, a locomotive's

black soul . . .

Any peak can pierce you

words, you words,

and any peak's desire,

words, you unwords . . .

God forgot me, in my thoughts

until my thought

became my body.

Leaves forgot me

shading over me

until the unseen

became my seen.

I wait as though someone

will remember me,

and meanwhile, worn by air, worn by snow

I snuff my light in anyone.

The unwhole is meant to dominate me,

god without thighs, goddess without arms.

Trees without trunks, grass without green,

a slalom of white through vertical dark.

Spiders cling to the winding silence

and behind their muffled fluttering,

their hearts drag themselves into an older body,

more solitary, edges crumpled, time sputtering.

The unwhole is meant to dominate me,

a single-faced medallion,

days that begin after noon and end after noon,

without continuation.

It can pop like a lightbulb,

this second, so familiar.

It can lie on top of us

and we drown under stale water.

Darting shadows flee at dusk

below the moon, like under a round

shelter thrown off at random

by all eyes opening – at once.

Inverted chimney, its smoke in the ravine,

the sky pulled into the gape.

Maybe that's why it shows, magnified

like under a glass, what for us remains.

Look: it resembles no word.

It cannot be said or seen.

It lies between the sky and earth

without an end, without beginning.

I fled by jumping on tip-toe

from body to body, like an arcade

lain over the dying row

of columns in a cold Hellas.

Dirty in spots, I flew

with open arms, forehead out,

eyebrows in the future,

while my thigh turned snow-white

between the jaws of a gnawing sky.

O, mouths give birth to great syllables

when they close in the abyss . . .

But I flew through a god's clenched teeth,

between Scylla and Charybdis.

In front of me, the galleries of air

with rats gnawing,

wings of angels asleep

with their sternums stuck in the earth.

Mirage of abundance, of rest,

of sleep against the milky

titty of the mother

who bore the divine

Jesus. Fa-la-la.

It rains and there is trash, fa-la-la,

it rains inside, in the breath,

fa-la-la, in fingers, fa-la-la,

in kneecaps, fa-la-la, the brow,

fa-la-la, in teeth,

fa-la-la, in bodies unborn

and fa-la-la, in bodies great.

So I'll stay, with my snout and pout yanked out

of the infected air, all of me

snagged on a hook by the roof of my mouth,

the pilot of the void and beings.

My, my, I'll end up in a cauldron

spiced with peppery meteorites,

food for another, higher being when

the starved with my starvation unites.

When a god swallows me, a living god,

I'll plunge into the well of his stomach

where I will become a part of his body,

and stink like drink or undigested flesh.

He, he was made to be prey,