The Garden Within
The Garden Within
There are hidden rooms inside us that no one else knows of,
a hand knocks from within and asks us to open the door,
made, it seems, from the wood of a dream we forgot long ago,
and what fault is it of mine that I carry beneath my brow a swarm of deaf bees,
asleep for some time now in mercury, waiting for someone to wake them,
then a silence falls, heavy as snow not yet shaken loose,
somewhere, far off, a dog made only of smoke barks faintly,
it's cold, and inside us thin towers grow, as if carved from the bone of the moon,
orchards of apple trees in bloom where every blossom is a lost moment,
and we pass through them in silence, carrying one another like shadows of crystal.
It's understood that we live inside an old glass bell,
which shields us from the world, but at the same time, shuts us in,
we walk toward a gate that only the light knows how to open,
and there a weary, wordless song is waiting for us,
it has been sounding for us since the first day was born,
and now it can barely be heard, like a heart drained of blood,
we tell it, let's stay here, let's be nothing but the steam
off a warm window, in a house we can no longer find,
let me pour into your palms a sweet mercury, clearer than dew
off a jade leaf, forgotten at the edge of a garden,
but from the north an old, faceless wind comes,
shakes us to our foundations, and snuffs out the candle in our chest,
a silent guard asks us to give an account, one by one,
of every thought we lost, carelessly, along the way,
he leads us into a room without doors, where we learn, alone,
a language as old as silence, one we will never use,
and someone, a brother perhaps, watches us silently from the threshold,
with eyes full of a yellow smoke we cannot name,
then we climb into a boat of steam that glides slowly
on a river that, it seems, empties out nowhere,
around us a world roars that we no longer recognize,
and we smile without meaning to, as in a dream we can't stop,
though, somewhere inside us, something starts to tremble with fear.
There are so many things that happen to us and that we let fall,
unlived, into a bottomless well from which nothing more is heard,
and each of us believes, in his own solitude, that he carries a secret
no one else carries, though almost all of us carry the same one.
But I remember that happy time, before I existed,
when I lived hidden beneath my mother's heart, like a light held underwater,
I stayed there wondering, undisturbed, what it was I might be missing,
outside, a nameless rain was falling over a city I had never seen,
and she slept, and I grew inside her, silent, like a stone that dreams,
she turned over in her sleep, and whispered to me, without knowing it,
spells as old as the world, words I did not yet understand,
but which would later hold me together, whole, through every fall,
she knew an old, harsh law of the blood, and wanted, with all she had,
to protect me from it, for as long as she could, for as long as she still had strength.
And through the paneless window there slowly passed a ship of crystal,
carrying off toward nowhere all the names that, once, I forgot.
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