XII
Night's sleepless horse gallops on,
this flash keeps him awake (this light, over there).
He has no shadow.
The faces of my dead are printed
on his dark body,
one by one
like I promised.
A multitude of blue eyes open and close
side by side in the architecture
of the horse's back, from heart to femur and from femur to mane.
He is all eyelids.
The branches that advance from tree to tree
trace a unique body, confused: a family.
The force that keeps this garden
alive
has nothing to do with life.
Immune to its obligation to die,
immune to the flow of water
and the stream of air
between wing and wing.
The trees are there, only green in the highest part,
they twist in knots, in eyes
that do not serve to see, like the dirt,
it's all so foreign as I fly over it, the dead over there,
catching light in the dense leaves.
Between the roots (twisted into a message)
the dead flap their wings: thirsty relics.
*
This part of the book is illegible
from the influence of a verdurous language.
If I was water I would know what it says.
In a stream from the sixteenth century a sheep washes itself.
If I step in this water it will reveal the sky.
The book reads me to myself
even if I will never be water,
even if I can never walk in this jungle
that was once a garden.
The book reads me.
It reads the novel written between my neck and my shoulders.
It reads the multiplication of lines on my hands.
The book reads me
and the book writes me.
It writes that slow winter light licks
the side of the leaves.
It writes that oranges rot on the patio,
the bamboo balances, the palm trees creep up
the walls,
that the ash tree is the altitude
and that all together they drown the sound of the bells.
It writes that every stump of wood holds a
dead life.
So it is written
that night's horse gallops,
and casts no shadow,
and the faces of my dead
are tattooed on him.
The sheep sculpted in stone, spits,
aimlessly washing its body.
Impartial, it renders the view
from the terrace:
below
between the writing of intertwined roots,
the dead grow fingernails
and above
the trumpets sound.
I am neither above nor below,
I am not water,
I see the limits of my sight
in winter's pale light.
To me the horse appears to sleep
and the bridge shuts down.
God is the stain.
You who read this, unfold these pages
and deliver them to a miner or a diver.
They will know what to do.
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