A piercing through the dark
In the face of darkness, this secluded space is a pathology
likewise to live alone in it.
My heart keeps failing in bits, as the voice from the evening news,
crisp as snowflakes, announces that twitter
has just been banned in my country.
It’s close to bedtime, and my lover is on his knees,
hunched over the bed on the other side
praying in a language only he understands.
Empty tonight, I remember walking with my father to the cardiologist’s
six years ago, after I’d fallen for the fourth time,
off the cliff of a hill,
my feet devoid of sensations, my head swirling
as in a circumventing tornado.
When the doctor asked me to describe the pain in my chest,
I think I said: angina.
I think I said: pectoris.
I think I said: there is an elephant on my chest.
I can’t remember which now.
But I’m sure he heard: my heart is clean and white as silk.
And muttered in reply: I know. I know.
After praying, my lover tells me he feels God has listened too much
to my arrhythmic heartbeats,
God sees your racing heart, he whispers.
Why not tell him something he has never seen?
He proceeds to talk to God again, about twitter,
and starts with: a country, velvety red. Blood red.
Red of the marooned. Red of the shipwrecked.
Red of oxygenated blood,
stuck within the perimeters of an endangered heart.
There is a trembling inside the both of us
precipitated by silence.
We can’t find more words for God than these.
This is where language begins. This is where language ends.
Otherwise, I choose to die intestate
Nine times, I’ve found myself sprawled out,
etherized on the ECG table, in a room
peopled by cardiac monitors and
bespectacled cardiologists.
Nine times I’ve known the speed at which my heart beats
to exactly equate the velocity of light,
which is the same, I suppose, as the gravitational pressure
exerted on a given body in motion,
taken by the exquisite art of free-falling,
self-destructively.
One night, my father hid himself somewhere between bodies,
stationed at the entrance of my room
while I agonized.
I swear, if I believed in forgiveness,
here is what I’d have said to him:
I forgive you for passing unto me,
your heart of stone.
A heart not capable of loving in the way
the world has come to know it,
and choosing instead, time after time,
all the several darknesses that I hated once,
but have now come to love
like the cologne of a passer-by,
long lost to the winds.
In lieu of etiology, signs and symptoms
At the end of my suffering,
there was a door.
− Louise Glück
To live alone
in this birdhouse,
is a pathology,
even more so
on nights
when the act
of living
equates the elegance
of an archer,
speaking resurrection
into a scattering
of arrowheads.
There is a piercing
happening
in my myocardium,
at the same time
as the disappearing
of a covey of quails
overhead,
into the gathering twilight.
On a distant field,
six boys,
barefooted,
leap after a ball
with the agility
of an army of tadpoles
and in a fleeting moment,
I wish for this perfect
sense of navigation
again,
like the old days
of ravenous health.
But I tell you,
in my alone-ness,
I am the offspring
of all the little lights.
I am the flowing
river’s
unshakeable escort.
