The Wordless Woman
1
The wordless woman contemplates the rain
Beyond her lowered blinds. Leaves
Choke up the railings, obstruct her throat
A while ago, a passage opened up
Amidst the raindrops’ hurried murmur, like
A beast striding in spirals of the ear
Words at this moment beat a retreat
Furl up their corollas. The sky’s silk
Tears into a puzzle broken up in pools
She must begin everything over in the first day’s light
Gather those shards frozen on the asphalt
Warm in her arms the broken god
Osiris or Orpheus
2
The wordless woman is submerged in any music
The accent of her homeland obsesses her
Hearing devours her
When she bends over the voice’s well
What does she hope to dredge up from that darkness
Where a pebble carves out waves that become slower
And more muted?
Around this no-man’s-land
Unbannered forces clash
Victory, defeat, are unimportant
Only a stretch of time to be crossed without dishonor
She knows no lullaby to
Cajole her grief, no steely rhyme
To tame it. She uses it like a carpet
An armchair into which her tired body drops
Under the lamplight, a stained pillow
Melancholy is her annuity
3
Veiled at the corner of the cemetery
Time waits knowing nothing about mourning
It cannot fix the cause as this or that
Event and thus make a decision
The wordless woman disowns the hourglass
Hands crumbling the lizard snatched
From the wall of its sleep. Her life
Is a discourse never quite uttered, sheltered
From sentences chopped by the alternation
Of days and nights
4
Day erases itself as night arrives
Like a child
Whose mother has let him play
Before coming to tuck him into bed
She tells him stories
Which will feed his dreams
When night has fallen, the wordless woman
Retraces paths of possibilities
Outside the waxy rays
Swarms of ghosts descend on her
Night erases itself as day arrives
Like a mother letting her child
Put his imaginings to the test
His naïve beliefs his myths
5
The wordless woman hails the dawn
When clouds drown themselves in the vaster
Cloud of the sky. Behind the draperies
A prince prepares himself. Sometimes he has
The sun’s face and sometimes the face of death
In his path windows brighten: there is
That human light those children’s eyes
At the rims of their cups their sharp teeth
Ready to bite into every apple
While beneath deserts of stars
Flies burrow in the wide-open eyes
Of children just like these
Depositing their species’ rosaries
6
To speak of all of those? Speech
Distances us from the sea in which we must dissolve
So we won’t feel ourselves spit out like froth
The waves besiege the tower’s base
On the blinds’ slats across our castles’ loopholes
The new Dark Ages are announced
Which will not be tamed by metaphors
No more dusks or dawns
On a globe attacked by ants
Chained to other stars, nothing
But a blinking in the filaments
Of fragile disposable skulls
Through which rechargeable speech
Will circulate
7
The wordless woman calls for a verb
With the consistency of iron and lead
To resurrect the sword’s keenness
The art of rose windows
A tender, fragile verb
Like the undersides of eyelids
Where the world’s childhood could be reborn
In the storm of silence
As in the jungle of noise
Gardens are rubbed out
Forests burn
And the seed is lost.