Incantations
A.
Greetings, O body!
Ye melody that pleasure hath modulated as tones
With which it is delighted,
Tones it adores, tones that have elated it,
Tones it hath arranged in immediate correspondence
##### to the four humours:
The highest string <------> Yellow bale
The second string <------> Blood
The third string <------> Phlegm
The lowest string <------> Black bale
And it hath run rhythm in innumerable rivers.
Greeting, O Body!
B.
Come closer, O olive tree!
Let this wanderer embrace thee
Let him sleep in thy shade
Allow him to pour forth his life on thy kind trunk
And allow him to call thee:
O woman!
C.
At night,
We, women, get out of our beds
And walk naked till we reach the fringe of the village
We carry rods having the colour of clay,
Rods over which we sprinkle water.
We sit on the dry soil
#### …clouds emerge
and the rain ensues.
D.
Lie down, o beauty, on thy back
On this lovely grass
Place an exquisite flower between thy thighs
And tell thy charming lover
To displace it with his most gorgeous organ.
E.
Get naked, O blossoming tree, wrap thyself in moonlight
Descend, O Master Moon,
Wrap thyself in the blossoming tree
We have provided a ladder for thee,
Making the flower's foot the last of its steps;
We have bedecked it with other blossoms,
We have engraved on it drawings
Of cock species on land
Of catfish species at sea
So that we may witness the wedding of heaven and earth
The wedding of the body and the non-body.
F.
O you who wert pursued by a woman
That covered her body with school leaves
And banded her head with corollas
Her name was the Princess of Grass and Feast
And the Princess of Speech ?
O ye who hast departed!
Here we are, gathering around
Thy name,
#### Taking thee for a tree.
We break thee branch by branch
We create of thee a doll we cover with straw.
We cast it to the froth
And we say:
Froth
Is
Also
One
Of the keys
Of the sea.
G.
Take a plait of thy hair
Tie it to this branch
Leave them windward in embrace
Where heaven descends
Earth ascends
In the image of two lovers
Where harlotry weds prophecy
turning into ingots of joy
On every high hill
And under every green tree
Where heaven bears witness against us
And the stones bear witness against heaven.
H.
Ye, who hast departed, (when we had come together)!
We now marvel at our unity
We mock it
Now the very significance reveals itself to us
Ye, who hast departed
As a line that returns to itself,
Bends in one direction
And infinitely extends in other directions ?
Here we are gathering around
Thy name
We confine thee between night and day
And we build up the orient as evidence.
And in thy name we identify:
The night is the black colour of attachment
The day is the white colour of detachment
The night is the illusion of addition
The night is unity: nothing is with them
The day is the existence of patterns in reasoned dust
The night is perplexity/ complexity of factors
The day is rectitude/ presence
The night is contemporaneity
The day is extension
And the orient is a relation
The orient is recurrent voices
And states of revelation.
Orbits
1.
Why, O why, do I fail
To awake thee, O forest
That lies dormant within me?
2.
- Your thoughts, like clouds,
Are ships without harbour.
- Can you direct me to one single shore?
3.
The clouds are the most articulate speech
On the obscurity of life.
4.
The clouds leaned over the forest
And they were torn by the winds.
5.
I have started to believe
That it is possible to criticise the skyline,
Departing from the clouds,
Or conversely:
To criticise the clouds,
Departing from the skyline.
Could such criticism be of any use
To the clouds of poetry or to its skyline?
6.
He's described himself thus:
Silent in company,
Silent in seclusion,
Talkative
In conditions other than these.
7.
She's asked me:
Does the night dream?
And if it did, would it really dream of the day?
8.
Yesterday,
The sun awoke me,
And I was dreaming of it.
9.
When he lost his lady friend, he wrote lamenting her:
A splendid body that would adorn a love nest
We now lower into a fosse!
It is not, oh, a matter of death,
It's a matter of decency.
Tears
The star weeps, -
The star's tears are a night.
Promenade
A star in a long dress
Strolling among the palm trees.
A Rose
A rose. Its own fragrance is its home
And the breeze its bed.
Thirst
Is there water anywhere that may quench
The thirst of water.
A Woman's Face
I have dwelt in the face of a woman
That dwells in a wave
The ebb casts on a shore
That has lost its harbour in its shells.
I have dwelt in the face of a woman
That murders me, one that loves to inhere
As an unlit lighthouse in my blood that keeps sailing
### to the extremity of madness.
