I

Dreaming doesn’t always have colour or movement:

at times, it is a state. And my dream last night

was silent and green like water,

and like water it was dark, perhaps with the mere trace

of some living thing gliding beneath the sky.

But a mental sky, as when eyes see

with a vision of eyes turned inward:

not sensory vision, nor the recollection

of sensory vision; not the tremulous

colour of a cloud bleeding out,

but that which, red, like an echo of light,

breathes again when the western wind subsides.

The dream of last night was a state: not the center,

but the shore, the outskirts of the world.

Before objects, as though sustaining the object;

before me, before that instant

in which I will say: ‘I am I’, and it will still be a dream,

but, while dreaming, with the feeling that, when opening my eyes,

if I remember it, I will know that already I was someone.

Nothing could jolt me or matter to me yet

because I was not yet a being: I was only

a state, a waiting. At times comes obliquely

a very fine rain, on the first nights

of a winter too long delayed. It is cool already

and the sky is a purple-darkened beacon,

and these half-empty streets seem from another time.

It rained like this, dulcet rivulet

with that dead point of shop windows,

half-blurred by the waters of yesterday’s cities.

This is what I wanted to say: a state of this kind,

unsure if it is lived or remembered –

the very moment we find ourselves in –

without impulse toward anywhere, without feeling

the need to leave anything behind, or that anything belongs to us.

Neither relinquishing nor holding. I was

a thing of which I could not say that it had a name at all.

Poised to pounce, awaiting the bestowal of identity:

the state of flowing water, or of water still,

identical to metal that will strike it all at once.

Brilliance of water mixed with brilliance of metal:

metal doubled in my eyes, made a lone metal of water,

the metal of the mind and of the senses,

one light, freed from being light,

an idea of light. Because the theme of the dream

is the idea of the I. Confusedly, I felt

that in that stunted greenish splendor

I was projecting acts, or the shadow of what I am.

II

If the sky cries to you, if you hear the sky cry to you

with a cry from the abyss, to suck you

upward, downward, where the mane

of the astral snow goes dark

or the squamous iciness of night,

or if, even louder, you yourself cry

and cannot cease to hear, with a voice as hoarse

as in the pallid ear of a deaf man,

or insidious and naked like water

that wounds the moon with an axe-like splendor:

if you cry toward the center of yourself, if you feel

that all that crying is finding a center

and the knot of light that you are appears to you;

if, within you, you are cried to, will you see,

perhaps, when you rise, that dream I dreamt last night?

See is not quite the right word: I didn’t see it,

rather I myself was my dream.

Not that I saw myself, but rather

there was something and it was I.

The theme of appearances

is the theme of the self. But this time

I saw no concrete identity:

no image appeared to me.

I didn’t unfold, didn’t gaze. It was

a null state, the negative of living,

the silence of the river divested of water,

the clarity of a sky bereft of blue

and yet sky: an invisible glimmer,

sensed as a void of visibility.

Such is the bed of a river: soil, rock, repose

of the devastated drought, branch, green rancor

that abandoned the vegetal world, damp

drunk down by the wasteland. The light glances

and, look, all is rock and hunger and dust:

yet the water lives there. It is a region of absence

violent like the sun, which doesn’t flow,

but instead is immobile. It is an iron enchased,

the water now free from being water, weighing

on the riverbed. Like the murmur water

makes when not running in the bed of the dry river.

VIII

Acorn, honeysuckle,

powerful citron,

Peiking lilac,

the violent splendor of the sparrows in summer,

the rosebush under the sun,

the pomegranates like red fog,

reverberation of the eye,

the church of green apples,

colour of canes blown by wind,

word of mud and marsh,

carob tree in flames,

the marigold, the begonia,

the carnation of whitest light,

the blackberry,

parliament of river and moss,

the breath of the plant when it speaks,

treading a silence made of vibrations,

when we walk through the water,

when we are wind,

when the brightness prods and transfigure us,

dissolved in a carmine of clouds,

the lances level all of it:

the path, the pickets,

the fruit,

the blue pear at nightfall,

with the blue of iridescent sky,

the darkened, tragic ivy,

the corruption of the pepper,

the twilights like water,

the lances level all of it, the flattened

paths make a creaking like wheels

of dead carriages, of wood and carcasses,

scent of sandalwood rotting,

lividity of trees besieged,

lances of light and of gold,

pillage of peapods and Japanese medlars,

brilliance of buckshot and old shotguns,

the hunting pavilion,

the dark gazebo,

the body of this woman is an inferno of silk,

moist like burnt leaves

in a November forest, when the light

has the colour and savor of ash,

rivulets of resin and juice from the bark,

the taste of roots and bruised fruit,

the taste of a woman’s urine, pearling and warm

like the ambarine night, taste of summer and memory

when the lances labor on the stubble of winter.