1. INSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A TREE
Beautiful women in smoky blue culottes
lying around on fluffy pink pillows
beneath windows onto charming views,
sea views, seasonal leaves and trees.
Inside is outside and outside inside.
Smell of saltwater swimming in the room.
2. OUTSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A ROCKING CHAIR
Our ropes are the roots
of our life. We fish
low in the earth,
the river beneath runs through our veins,
blue and cold in a riverbed.
When the sun comes up,
the moon moves slowly to the left.
I tie the logs and limbs together,
holding them in place.
The ocean beats them
smooth like rock.
Here my sense of time is flat.
I find in a strip of damp sand
footprints and marks of hands,
and torn pieces of flesh.
Night is a beast.
The tide moves, gushing
back and forth.
I was young once, at least, if not beautiful.
And what is beauty anyway? The light off snow
is pretty. I was young once, as young as any.
After all, she thought, to know the edge
of truth or of mountains, you need to lie or fall.
Everyone has an inner life, O careless love,
it's as simple as that. That's why they hurried
to marry before the month ended — fear of June.
She would avert her eyes from the magazines'
special issues with brides on their creamy covers.
Heraldry and all its lovely language;
I chose my time there learning
elsewhere, where else than land,
Landscape, and how to live, in it
is not like, nothing is like, the colors
or the snow, it is not like pearl and
it is not like the glitter of rainwater
that darkens the bark against which
the occasional bloom-laden branch
might be seen shedding petals. No.
Here is the past: One was once a boy
and read books and could not pronounce
Pei designed the building with views,
smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned
for a photo opportunity; inside are files
sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather.
Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls
from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book.
He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather
with views of mountains and with music constant.
Is there a sound? There is a forest.
What is the world? The word is wilderness.
What is the answer? The answer is the world.
What is the beginning? A beginning is happiness.
What is the end? No one lives there now.
What is a beginning? The beginning is light.
What makes happiness? Nothing.
What makes an ending? What does not.
What is her skin? Her skin is composed of strange clothing and clouds of butterflies,
of events and odors, of the rose fingers of dawn, transparent suns of full
As a child
I put my finger in the fire
to become
a saint.
As a teenager
every day I would knock my head against the wall.
As a young girl
I went out through a window of a garret
to the roof
in order to jump.
As a woman
I had lice all over my body.
They cracked when I was ironing my sweater.
I waited sixty minutes
to be executed.
I was hungry for six years.
Look in the mirror. Let us both look.
Here is my naked body.
Apparently you like it,
I have no reason to.
Who bound us, me and my body?
Why must I die
together with it?
I have the right to know where the borderline
between us is drawn.
Where am I, I, I myself.
One must be brave to live through
a day. What remains
is nothing but the pleasure of longing — very precious.
Longing
purifies as does flying, strengthens as does an effort,
it fashions the soul
as work
fashions the belly.
It is like an athlete, like a runner
who will never
stop running. And this
gives him endurance.
I am not born as yet,
five minutes before my birth.
I can still go back
into my unbirth.
Now it’ s ten minutes before,
now, it’ s one hour before birth.
I go back,
I run
into my minus life.
