Distances

I

From flesh into phantom on the horizontal stone / I was the sole witness to my homecoming ... // Serene lights on the other balcony: / redolent fountains bristling with signs — // But what does my divine rejoicing hold? / A bowl of incense, a nest of fireflies? // I was the sole witness to my homecoming ... // For in the inflorescence of the white / chamber, a voice, from very far away, / chanted, and the chamber descanted, the birthday of earth, / paddled me home through some dark / labyrinth, from laughter to the dream. // Miner into my solitude, / incarnate voice of the dream, / you will go, / with me as your chief acolyte, / again into the anti-hill ... // I was the sole witness to my homecoming ...

II

Death lay in ambush that evening in that island; / yoice sought its echo that evening in that island. // And the eye lost its light, / the light lost its shadow. // For the wind, eternal suitor of dead leaves, / unrolled his bandages to the finest swimmer ... // It was an evening without flesh or skeleton; / an evening with no silver bells to its tale; / without lanterns, an evening without buntings; / and it was an evening without age or memory — // for we are talking of such commonplaces, / and on the brink of such great events ... // And in the freezing tuberoses of the white / chamber, eyes that had lost their animal / colour, havoc of eyes of incandescent rays, / pinned me, cold, to the marble stretcher, // until my eyes lost their blood / and the blood lost its odour, // and the everlasting fire from the oblong window / forgot the taste of ash in the air’s marrow: // anguish and solitude ... / Smothered, my scattered / cry, the dancers, / lost among their own / snares; the faces, / the hands held captive; / the interspaces / reddening with blood; // and behind them all, / in smock of white cotton, / Death herself, / the chief celebrant, / in a cloud of incense, / paring her fingernails ... // At her feet rolled their heads like cut fruits; / about her fell / their severed members, numerous as locusts. // Like split wood left to dry, the dismembered / joints of the ministrants piled high. // She bathed her knees in the blood of attendants; / her smock in entrails of ministrants ...

III

In the scattered line of pilgrims / bound for Shibboleth / in my hand the crucifix / the torn branch the censer // In the scattered line of pilgrims / from Dan to Beersheeba / camphoTiodine chloroform / either sting me in the bum. // On the stone steps on the marble / beyond the balcony / prophets martyrs lunatics / like the long stride of the evening // At the clearing dantini / in the garden dillettanti; / vendors princes negritude / politicians in the tall wood ...

IV

And at the archway / a triangular lintel / of solid alabaster / enclosed in a square / inscribed in a circle / with a hollow centre, / above the archway / yawning shutterless / like celestial pincers / like a vast countenance: // the only way to go // through the marble archway // to the catatonic pingpong // of the evanescent halo ... // And beyond the archway / like pentecostal orbs / resplendent far distant / in the intangible void^ / an immense crucifix / of phosphorescent mantles: // after we had formed / then only the forms were formed // and all the forms / were formed after our forming ...

V

Sweat over hoof in ascending gestures — / each step is the step of the mule in the abyss — / the archway the oval the panel oblong / to that sanctuary at the earth’s molten bowel / for the music woven into the funerary rose / the water in the tunnel its effervescent laughter / the open laughter of the grape or vine / the question in the inkwell the answer on the monocle / the unanswerable question in the tabernacle’s silence — // Censers, from the cradle, / of a nameless religion: // each sigh is time’s stillness, in the abyss ... // Mated and sealed / in a proud oblation, // brothers to silence and the wandering rocks; // with the burden of the pawn, / on the molten stone, // and the scar of the kiss and of the two swords. // Sweat over hoof / in the settled abyss: // each sigh is the stillness of the kiss ...

VI

The season the season / the tall wood the clearing / the season the season / the stone steps the dream ... // Come into my cavern, / Shake the mildew from your hair; / Let your ear listen: / My mouth calls from a cavern ... // Lo, it is the same blood that flows ... // Shadows distances labyrinths violences, / Skeletal oblong / of my sentient being, I receive you / in my perforated / mouth of a stranger: empty of meaning, / stones without juice — // the goat still knows its fodder, / the leopards on its trail — // For it is the same blood, / through the same orifices, / the same branches / trembling intertwined, / and the same faces / in the interspaces. // And it is the same breath, liquid, without acolyte / like invisible mushrooms on stone surfaces. // And at this chaste instant of delineated anguish, / the same voice, importunate, aglow with the goddess — // unquenchable, yellow, darkening homeward / like a cry of wolf above crumbling houses — // strips the dream naked, / bares the entrails; // and in the orangery of immense corridors, / I wash my feet in your pure head, O maid, // and walk along your feverish, solitary shores, // seeking, among your variegated teeth, / the tuberose of my putrescent laughter: // I have fed out of the drum / I have drunk out of the cymbal // I have entered your bridal / chamber; and lo, // I am the sole witness to my homecoming.