If the voice could come out of photographs
in the same way as shadow or tenderness – even though
these are more vulnerable realities – I would hear
again my father explaining to me how, before
you pick up a stone, you should roll it
with your foot or with a branch to frighten away
the scorpions that hide under it like dry thorns.
I never worried about them. Because being six
years-old was easy, as easy as dying. In both
matters, there was no secret other than the air:
to breathe it or not to breathe it, as though the soul
were full of diminutive alveoli that open
and close. The first scorpion I saw
was in a book on natural history,
caught forever between the severe pincers
of time. Sometimes, however, books don’t explain
the whole truth, as though they don’t know it
or had forgotten it on the way to the printers.
Arachnid having the body divided between abdomen
and cephalothorax. Nothing was said about the burning
sun of the tongue, of fear, of the spike
piercing the throat. I was unaware then
that words are huge icebergs
that conceal under icy waters much
more than they show. Like the word scorpion.
And now, while the telephone rings insistently –
a piercing early morning cry – while I get up,
turn on the light, stretch out my hand to its white
plastic body shining like a stone in the sun,
while I lift it, and say yes? and a voice tells me you are dead,
all I can think of are those scorpions, and what
you wanted to tell me when you repeated make
the stones roll away, please, make the stones roll away.