Translated by: Mia Dintinjana
I am building a house anew. From inarticulate voices.
From chains of catterpillars. From tufts of nettles in bloom…
From clipped nails, wisps of cut-off hair, dried
semen turned to white dust. From screams in a dream
out of which I will never awake. I am building it
in a meadow gone wild, where a woman lay
naked, with a golden cloud in her eyes and a peony blossom
on her breast. Mother of all mothers and lover of all
lovers. Overgrown with ivy. With an anthill under
each armpit. With a tuft of grass in place of pubic hair.
And with a ladybird on a blade of grass swayed by an invisible wind
and the coolness wafting from a poet’s grave. With a cow’s
piss dripping on her, mingling with large drops of warm milk.
With the smell of jasmine that gushes from the ashes
of her memory, moving a lock of hair off her forehead. I am building a house.
A chapel and a brothel. A house even more vacant and sad
than it was before this thought of mine about a tiny place
in which a poem needs to be completed
in the same way a life ends, flowing
out of the veins cut by a rusty razor.
A small place where I can, painlessly, give birth to my mother,
as she gave birth to me. My mother who kept,
right until her death, the news of which still
hasn’t reached me, my umbilical cord
and a lock of my once long fair hairin a flaxen bag
on the bottom of a closet made of walnut wood.
I am building a house anew. Out of nothing. For no-one.
A house made of language.