Here I am all alone, quarrelling with the age, both feet kicking the jugs of Being. Night vibrates with a litany of shadowless reflections. From its window the Absolute in profile contemplates its confines: the celestial sounds propagate through the old pond where metal and loam, past and ends, bone and vocable come to slake their thirst. Mud explodes and consciousness sails against the current. In this immense opacity of contemplation where air is the anticipation of darkness, I see the singular rise in multiples from the bottom of the amphora and wait in the cold of the real to be smashed.
No need to step into a sea at the edge of which the prophets came to a halt, or crack open the world's safe, for man to be the knot of creation and keep in his hands the Seal of future treasures. Creative in each one of us, the spark, no longer hoping to unite with the fires of heaven, becomes flame, spark of itself, mother of all ignitions, new lands. A drop flees the ocean, becomes ocean. The universe holds out a hand to the ephemeral.
 
 

IF ONLY THE HORSE
WAS LEFT TO ITS SOLITUDE
 
 

Concerning the book Why did you leave
the horse to its solitude? by the Palestinian poet 
Mahmoud Darwish

Blood spurts from his lips.

Its leaves falling,
A bald light
For a ballet of silex,
A next morning that doesn't sing
Under the feet of the slogans.

Tossed about by where the quest takes her
On the dead sea of a peace
Whose edges are licked by war,
The Cause, against the cold
Takes the form of a dipped star.

That she leave one day
The bath of common causes,
And she'll sober up from the
High of words,
And like a restive horse,
She ruminates the wind.
 
 

INK

The sun was drooling on the skulls... Somewhere the stones of the Revelation were consuming themselves. Women drew water and laughed. This Thursday, 4 June 632, the winds were eroding the tents' cloth; the centuries' skeletons stood in the immense desert. Something appeared on the vast horizon. A hoary head... illiterate, a prophet raved in front of his people: Give me ink and paper, I will write a book that will keep you forever from error! Heaven was echoing with their disputes and disagreements: "Come closer, he'll write you a Book that will forever keep you from error," some said. "God's messenger is delirious, answered the others, we have the Book that is enough for us." Seeing them gab endlessly, he yelled: Get out of my sight, what I'm busy with is better than what you are trying to hire me to do!

At noon on this day already sliding into man-amnesic history, the eraser sent to sweep impiety from the surface of the earth was raving. He burrowed the ground of the revelation: Let there come a new era, like a second Hegira that would see the Verse crumble! Ah! If the infidels could have suspected that his delirium contained so many possibles, they would have presented him with ink distilled from the blood of the Message.  The prophets, however, are rarely explicit because they are weary of unforeseen consequences. Yet now the effacer, alone, tears in his eyes, reveals in his sleep the unspeakable buried in his heart. But each time he wakes up, he stares at the ceiling and intones: O God! Supreme Companion! For several days he thrashes about in his bed, head bandaged, face on fire, forehead sweating, but not a single verse, not even a satanic one, is revealed to him. So now he gazes into the mirror and sees an unknown graybeard where usually there stood a vigorous man: Where is the one who stood here yesterday? When did he leave? When? The placid mirror, without saying a word, tells him: the other one has been and this one came. Suddenly the heavenly link broke. All his limpid ideas crossed over and into the night of history where they foundered. The Supreme Companion took away his Seal of Prophets!

A trickle of saliva ran from his mouth and dribbled, cold by now, onto his sweet companion's breast. He gave up the ghost with her nipple in his mouth. Then a herald raised a cry from the depth of his house: "Wash him in his clothes!" He was washed wearing his shirt, the water was turned on and the body scrubbed. At dusk he was buried. It was a dark night when the noise of the pick axes came to the ears of the atheists who, while discords roiled like the shades of night, were fomenting factions against a background of exegeses.

Had the Supreme Companion but consented to an ultimate revelation and on the spinning page torn from a book, we could have read: the Book will debase you!
...and to melt Descartes' wax in the nomads' throats.
 
 

Translated by Pierre Joris