Conversation with the Living Silence
Conversation with the Living Silence
We steal from the mouths of the living dead, we tear out the raw consonants,
and we call theft this harvest of fruits unfelt in the forests,
we call love-on-the-verge-of-forgetting this adoration-in-sweat,
when the dead speak more silently than our noisy silence.
Their sentences shine harshly, carved by thousands of blind tongues,
polished in deep trenches that we fill with new breaths,
I lift a phrase like a light stone heavy as the mountain from muddy water,
still wet with the meanings of a dead writer who still breathes.
"For the well-disorganized mind, life is the great death,"
but whose broken mind? whose life buried in foreign words?
words belong to no one living, to all the dead who speak to us,
a key passed from hand to cold hand until the metal freezes.
Maybe all poetry is stolen from the future that never was,
each word a body that we invoke to be silent more loudly,
each verse a séance where the dead teach us,
the future dead, to speak in the voices of those who will write the world.
We live in the mouths of others, we speak with tongues borrowed in sleep,
and all we say is the echo of an echo that hasn't resounded yet,
the fruits grow back into the trees, the trees descend back into sap,
we climb into the mouths of the dead and they descend into our living mouths.
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