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1
I have come into this world to see it vanish.
This is the most I can do: I will see if I can conjure
an alter, an other,
a body that can stop time, that can be seen.
I will see if I can conjure
a body that can stop time.
2
A bird with a human face flies through the world
with its eyes turned backwards
watching the world recede –
I saw its face and could not look it in the face.
I saw a light that penetrated
until I could see my own skull.
I could look outward but it was impossible to look inward.
I saw all the terrible things in the world
and they were my own.
3
I see the word, face, in the sky;
I am a face, a face of this time.
I remember a room with a vaulted ceiling
and a wedge of light that began to unfold,
a face that was a door – a face in the mirror –
of this time – I’m trying to speak
a language limited to its own horizon,
a face framed
by what it is not.
4
I saw face in the lights, a number
which is not part of numeration,
zeros floating in the night sky –
the zero and the one.
Who is the other that you say is the same as me?
I see through the screen a procession of faces –
a fluttering paper –
a shape that is not here –
a perfect absence –
something that cannot be escaped,
but that can be spoken.
I feel it is not yet spoken.
I am looking for a word that would mark a pain or a joy
outside the capacity of language.
6
A starry night a cloudless sky
a night of a dream of a day a night of the mouth,
a night of night, of the one,
of the shadow, a night of wind,
of the window,
a night of the wall.
7
It is raining upwards and we are falling
toward the center of the earth.
I see you through the screen.
What does the screen do to a body?
To know love is to know disaster.
How strange it is to speak of history
when we are not yet.
8
I see your body from the light’s point of view,
through the wind’s point of view.
I feel you in the distance – a window, a mirror, a glass.
I see myself though you, the depths of time never empty.
I am not in the picture, but I am always in the frame.
I am in between the frame and the world.
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