White Piano (2 page)

    the vultures had already eaten her tongue and eyes
                                                                                – a witness

fence we called it barbed wire
wall or whisper to me
also another phrase
between here and over the border
I still have a head on my shoulders

from the other side of the rio the sun licks
an eye, perfect
traverse it we must
between crosses and nails
bouquets of irises
no una de más

Eyelids 1

her
mouth
plays dead while blood
trickles in the dust of a vacant lot
her mouth makes nO sound
not even a coagulated gesture
lightly on what’s left of
lipstick

almost not dead
just a palpitation a word snagged
in the soft fold of the cheek we all have
a word caressed with the tongue
like a sliver of pepper, ire

Eyelids 2

we don’t say
eyes
anymore
an eye here eye that shines lurking
slave amid glints of prose

Eyelids 3

you still have your
head
it happens every day
with blood that streams in decline
routine of round bellies
piled up just before death
anyway you can count

Eyelids1

your mouth’s full of thirst
still you breathe
piano massacre of teeth
the mouth in front of you does it whisper
yes, or unspeakable springs to mind
in the damp crimson mix of seconds

the eyes, the lips: more blood
you enter the nO sound
the mouth is immobile
abyss, you feel the urge to leap
images too of vital organs

Eyelids2

the eye’s no longer shaped like an eye
neither yours nor hers
her eye moves like an eye
as soon as you compare
it’s no longer an eye

iris the word doesn’t apply
only cornea
all the rest is torn up
on the brink of sinking
into nO noise
the chasm of the face

Eyelids3

don’t confuse head and face
from up close it’s round easier
with hair bolting horses reared up
but for the neck knocked red to the ground

Eyelids I

all night the mouth pulses
respiratory solution
its own heat is what keeps it moist
with cold-blooded sincerity
that hems between dialogues

Eyelids II

now the eye’s in the nO
urge to somersault
in space a slow crevice anticipates
its own erasure

Eyelids III

half a life, half a sonata
white panic piano
you repeat: this is nonetheless a head
a woman’s head round as a planet
from ankles to wrists to eyelids
you enter the nO nothing of being

Eyelids (mouth)

eyelids are no longer up to the task
bouquet of
lipstick
, her mouth cut
from all story stream universal
in the tiny background of numbers

Eyelets (eye)

from the other side of the phrase
the eye is a border eye
fear and its damp have unravelled
the eye of prose right up to cosmic blue

Eyelids (head)

we had to shut our eyes
in front of you a head
una de más
line of abyss
between the throat and nape the nape

We wear Mortality
As lightly as an Option Gown
Till asked to take it off –

– Emily Dickinson

Every language when we breathe it is
brief as we say my mother to the depths
of return

in each language our violence is intact
we inhale it with its collisions
its t/errors and small print
then in 3steps in a
Neues
museum
stroke of the bow
an image deflects our attention

in reality reading helps us vanish
the everyday self from words reborn
there where once we left as dust
anonymous in the mystery of breaths
or in a book line skipped typo erased

no language rests in the universal

sooner or later between our lips all languages
all tongues sift darkness

scraps of refrains
wall whispers it’s still
Berlin with risks of error and errantry
between the Gropius Museum and the Topography
of Terror

from there see the short man in glasses
a white skull on his cap
we see clearly that the city is a place
big enough for 60million faces
and a whiff of cosmos

and always the idea that in the distance
versatile it’s our fertile life
still credible
our way of breathing

at first language goes right through us
with a little monkey tremor
curious
cloaked in absence we know it, it leaps

alpha
brat
deceiver
of arms and repeated legs
all day Sunday, and days of invention

every language cultivates its own craters of fire
its wells of flavours and consent
a crazy number of lessons abbreviated in our chests

as for our body
do we really speak by simulating
head tipped over opposite of anguish
do we speak reciprocal
body hunched in its hunt for breathing

this morning language transformed
my mammal intentions
into one idea two lives exploded
in the chest
under my warm coat
one hour later of melancholy
all along the Spree
piano bang of keys in the arteries

we’ll foresee the sapidity of blood rolled in our 5senses
and xtimes the flavour: juniper clove mint viburnum
as for our body no one knows if it still wants
to speak fruits or white piano up to the brow
to soak in history
softly
sink
into what follows and the silk lamé of the horizon

… where there are no sentences, there is no truth …The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

– Richard Rorty,
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

We are made for eternity, but we do not know why.

– Elfriede Jelinek,
Jackie

She did not want to float or swallow
or fall from a bridge, she did not want to
but she wanted because art,
the water of before and after
she walked long nights
in the
calles
among the works of
ech.o

first image: vertical valour
500centuries of liquid light
she: arms extended torso hunched over
a water turned toward the sky
the colour of ink of algae
of impossible appeasement

warmth’s origin, July
of all proper names in weightless state
I vow a clarity so sharp the iris shatters
sometimes right to Vicenza

she came in silence
existing with a notebook or her camera
in the halls of archives floored in wood
we quickly admitted an obsession we loved
to repeat: here we live well
under the vaulted ceiling and fresco by Titian

from the window the canal water blind

an encyclopedia of bridges and clouds
bright lively beam of molecules in the light
: water that frightens: stop moving

at noon life tells its story in spirals of raw light
in her eyes, smooth yet imaginary
a cartouche of eternity she might have concealed
in her hair and caressed

at cocktail hour limoncello
all eyes turn toward the horses
we contemplate the Orient
it will take many centuries more
to erase the furor
of those four horses, the copy

when the water rises, she telephones
the moon turns in its cone of shadow
if I hunch down I can caress with my finger
these images in the form of silver prints
where sometimes a traveller dozes
her face fingered by wind
she says: this is devious landscape
we will have to count our belongings

tsunami of words
with your palm you wanted to reverse
fear you wanted it just
as the vaporetto arrived

art unfolds sketches of night
deceptive pronoun effects
art raises the rebellious side
of words scolded in Emma’s head

once again we thought of all that water fleeing
we spoke of tables overturned
of crimson dresses gone to pink
under crumbling ceilings
anyway we had to let the light in

night vaporetto night
nyx
neon slow
at five in the morning dawn entered
slowly sank into the voice
into the chest raising
monochromes of identity

when light strikes the
I
of sudden bereavements
she holds it in suspension
above the abyss in a wave of ululations
Emma says this image is slow
for the pink of palaces on the grand canal
the lapping of water that aches in the skull
this image is still too slow in the mouth

in the end, it was enough to leave the foam alone
along the canals listen float not searching
any further, the inside of someone
the narration of small absolutes

end of November someone spoke of Chicago
of Grant Park and of history

that night she became crowd
Emma crossed 3times the Ponte dell’Accademia

she did not want to be this rivulet
of repetition
along a blue canal a little
before dusk
in the garden of a Museum or on YouTube
filming or knocking on
her own fibre-optic silence

a little Casanova kissed in the Florian:
she held her like a key in the conversation
keeping a certain distance with her words
so that
vous-même
surreptitiously broke her heart

the universe bordered memory everywhere.
She’d had twenty years to work back to the Erinyes
and to the Atridae; to re-encounter dragons chimaera
all the red of Carpaccio and the head of Holophernes
twenty years to tame her fertility
without hallucinating in the new world
to adapt her heart’s rhythm
to all the nanotears and swells of melancholy

coffee steaming keyboard fingers
entire days she searches
for a link the paper the ego of echo
she can also boast
of paradoxes and
piercings

to recover from the water of shrinking glaciers
from each inflection of life in the voice
how to dig refuge in the figures of the self
exit a hotel room
exposed to all the winds of harmony, and the void

she holds her hand up like some distant machine
that might nourish her, reflect her story
she holds it out in front, hand mask wolf
having seen all the hanged figures
of Goya, and the others often

she touches on all the questions
because an idea of happiness
she washes the hours with words
because flesh because one day it’ll be necessary
to speak of meat and of happiness

she’d had 20years to learn the slippage
between the words women and reality
between universe and room of one’s own
several times her body became lodged
in the word @
space

initiating herself into enigmas and the living womb of women
twenty years to transcribe paragraphs of eternity
an intimacy of inkwash in the material of the present

all is tide night haunted
the t-shirt with a skull
no one had worn it
before you that evening mingled with perfume

it passed through the throat
everyone had a name
a little vibration recycled under the tongue
while rain touched the present