Little sentry guard,
you fall once again through the fissure of night
armed with nothing but your open eyes and terror
against the insoluble invaders of the blank page.
They were legion.
Legion made flesh was their name
and they multiplied the more you unpicked the fabric till the very
last thread,
cowering in your corner against the voracious spiderwebs
of nothingness.
Closing your eyes means becoming the dwelling place of the
whole universe.
Open them and you draw the boundary line and you stay out there at
the mercy of the sky.
To walk on that line is to lose your place.
Bouts of insomnia like long tunnels for testing every reality’s
inconsistency;
nights and more nights perforated by a single bullet that nails you into
the dark,
the same attempt to recognise yourself on waking inside the memory
of death:
that perverse temptation,
that adorable angel with a pig’s snout.
Who spoke of spells to counteract the wound of one’s own birth?
Who mentioned bribes for the emissaries of one’s own future?
Only there was a garden: in the depths of everything there is a garden
where the blue flower from Novalis’ dream opens.
Cruel flower, vampire flower,
more treacherous than the trap hidden in the plush of the wall,
a flower you can never reach without leaving your head or
whatever blood you still have on the threshold.
But, not caring, you kept leaning over to pick it, with no foothold,
just inward abysses.
You planned to swap it for the starving creature who was taking
over your house.
You built little ravenous castles in her honour;
you wore feathers that had broken free from the bonfire of
every possible paradise;
you trained small dangerous animals to gnaw away the bridges
of salvation;
you lost yourself just like the beggar woman with her delusion
of wolves;
you tried out languages like acids, like tentacles,
like ropes in the hands of a strangler.
Ah what poetry does, cutting your veins with dawn’s sharp edge,
and those bloodless lips sucking down venoms as speech turns empty.
And suddenly there’s no more.
The flasks have shattered.
Lights and pencils cracked in splinters.
The paper was torn apart with a tear down which you glide into
one more labyrinth.
All the doors are for getting out.
And everything is at the back of mirrors.
Little traveller,
alone with your collection box of visions
and the same unbearable sense of abandonment under your feet:
clearly with your voices you’re calling out like a drowned woman
for passage across;
clearly your enormous shadow that goes on flying above you in
the search for another still holds you back,
or you meet an insect whose membranes hide all chaos and
you tremble,
or you’re frightened by the sea that, so you think, fits into this
single tear.
But now that the silence has wrapped you twice over in its wings
like a mantle
I tell you again:
in the depths of everything there is a garden.
Your garden is there.
Talitha cumi.
Olga Orozco
Olga Orozco
