some days I can't help wondering what would
Anna Karenina say to madame Bovary
let's say they exchange ruminations, decide the future of clouds,
wonder if memory works like the fossils trapped in sand beds
ask one another what lipstick colour is trendy this year in Paris, Milan or Madrid
argue over their genesis, who is the winner
mind heart bone tissue trapped together
no, not sure about their order in a female lineage
do they descend from the Great Mother or
were they born from the head of Zeus
talk about anything but love: moonless nights, Kafka,
the purpose of life, the fragility of leaves, Victorian women
Madame dreams of Freud, Anna knows Darwin
contrary to their inbuilt frame of reference they wait for a fresh dawn,
touch their bodies with female eagerness.
behind their eyes love's net is heavy with meaning

this body a structure of rupture filled with words
their censorship - an act of love but
I can still feel their rawness, tenderness,
the milk of light, the roundness of sunset
I'll give them away to the rites of spring
to the procession of the shadows that carry us with them
to the unexpected burst of you like the morning light
poetry works best in silence

Every year the desert
           (with d from devils)
advances fifteen kilometers
           (with k from karma)
dries up springs
            (with s from spirits)
dries up more and more words.
The dictionary is ever more famished -
essences on the leap
stop for a second over the abyss,
then whiten the cracked earth.
The poet watches
the pure skulls of the words;
the words, still living and hungry,
watch the poet.

By Grete Tartler, translated by Liviu Bleoca

for Roger Caillois

Water hollows stone,
wind scatters water,
stone stops the wind.
Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,
stone's a cup of water,
water escapes and is wind.
Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,
water murmurs going by,
unmoving stone keeps still.
Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:
crossing and vanishing
through their empty names:
water, stone, wind

by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger

the dream is dreaming itself, we are its subjects
the mysterious writing of life, its ellusive quest
an inflationary expansion was deleting its traces
zero degree of consciousness in a moving aliveness
strange rhythms around and strange qualia
there were attributes without letters at first
before a predicate turned into subject
life othering itself into much more in its own image

life was chatting with itself before the knower and the known
spinning the seeds of time, change: its true substance
I am you and you are me but  we need
a symmetry break for the dawn of mind, the other of the body

so much was already done since life was rehearsing for eons its scripture, forms of habit, viable conventions
processing its otherness relentlessly
mind is this forest-creature exulting, hiding, defending,
breaking down, screaming, expulsing, recomposing, sprouting light and lightning

the very first thoughts traversed the barrier of vibrant void
their binding a translation of a body in time, a future storyteller
pure movement the nature of space, the wonder of above and bellow
the first qualia, tension and intensity, an unstructured  flow of frequencies, a cascade of warmth, fullness, emptiness,  
a body discovering herself, her unbearable, her rapture, the feeling of being

the centre is everywhere expanding, accelerating a creative chaos
thinking was just waking in the  field of a dreaming body
thoughts needed to outgrow slowly their skin of imaginary beings

then again and again
dreaming keeps decomposing the already thoughts trapped in their echo chambers, their networked cocoons circle our certainties
a thought needs to die to create another, a sacrifice to the god of the unknown
oh how many deaths we have already died recomposed only by dreaming, the solvent from which reality is born

intensively your body is translating feeling into dreaming,
extensively the mind is dislocating dreaming into thinking  
whille a distant star is crushing itself,  
love rehearses its gravity,
death is saturated by its own dismay

perhaps poetry is this witness of silent cosmogonies

words transcend themselves in that land without atmosphere:
the atoms of seconds colliding in my tissues
they arrive  in a living body with her inaudible pulses
the cry of an owl defies the noise without depth: the city descends into the nocturnal abrogation of its chimera
a sudden ripple in the density of flesh, this moment reveals its round edges,  the full potential of a feeling to mould itself into an acustic tenderness
fugitive thoughts denounce their orbit in a vertical intensity
an asymmetric perspective captures my hands : time is poetry. poetry, the descent into a living anarchy, an elusive certainty.
love, a mirror reflecting myriad forms & the insistence of stones. stones, the endurance of time caught up in its excitement,
a pulse untranslatable into other than oneself.

This light that follows me
I love its caress
Never let me live in darkness
Bathe me until I am whole

what dares disturb the illusion of hours without strife,
without venom, without height
the air is full of anice, things ocupy their prescribed places
in this compulsory life
when I was falling they said it wouldn't hurt
but my dreams were forbidden summers,
my hands were cracked by smiling
the energy of the verb to be intense while
I fell into this dialect of silence,
me and the  ghostly caress of a lonely woman

I am unknown to myself
when I look for a silhouette or
your stroboscopic touch
the canon of your steps full of woe
an infinitive phrase your timeless smile
silence has its alchemy
poetry finds me like a sacrificial song
being ourselves is enough
nothing more nothing less
the radiance of time a promise
who will be the woman dying one final death
is a stranger to me.
sing to me with the voice of morning
you, woes of laughter spirit

the world so fragile so resilient embracing tight
its spinning delusions, inequalities, contradictions
while he is smiling at his fists, the most powerful
a mascarade game we play with reality
impossible to tolerate the contact with daylight
democracy no longer soothes us when it lies to us
political agency crushed in empty pockets
eyes full of a radical hope
the truth obscured in our mythical mind

we need to be brutally honest with our mental health
with the health of the oceans, of the air, of our dreams
he is a fragment tormenting our fragments while
the world is not yet prepared to grieve its disneyland

an escapable paradox will hold us
oh, how are we falling when we think we are rising

the future is unstoppable
its echo chambers are searching
for some truth

time bombarded me wiht its silence today, the sky was closer, birds more transparent. maybe because of the intersection of wonder and scream. once I was one with my wounds. I had thoughts without spin today, only the wounds of the world spinning in the distance. the impossible mixture of blood dust shattered bricks, death is so ignorant, so messy. you used to smile when you saw me eating blueberries naked. in the core of trees there is silence, isn't it? in the core-self there is an emptiness full of antiwords, isn't it?

when I have nothing else to tell you
I'll write a poem or two
strange words for a strange world
as strange as the last day of a year
we need new clothes for thoughts
to dance anew the horror, the splendour