10.
On a wall, a lion
was sculpted
the first animal I loved
was cold
the second unveiled
the incredible depth of
the flesh
the stone
was from the
Orient,
love,
elsewhere.
11.
Watch out
for the past,
a poison for our
fields,
for these columns
which are trees,
regardless of spring
or winter.
12.
There, abroad,
centuries-old oaks
have heard Napoleon’s steps
climbing the
Rhone Valley,
to fall,
further North, on
enemy territory
all defeat
is the end
of a life.
13.
Stones resume their conversations
to make us admit that
materiality bewilders
us,
objects being the children
of their own shadows.
Play in the infernal
jungles as monkeys do,
enter the
labyrinth that
you are.
14.
Theseus tried to kill
the Minotaur
with whom his wife had
deceived him
but the string
broke,
and his anger fell
on his son.
Since, someone may
remember him, but
that ascertains
his death.
15.
There’s in Baalbeck a temple dedicated
to Bacchus, and in
Bolinas a Night Palace
that Joanne Kyger
protects with her
poems
from under our
footsteps rises a phantom
which quickly
evaporates,
because our countries don’t
cease going up in
smoke.
16.
Work is an
incurable
architecture
practiced on
ourselves…
I would like to be within
an insanity that will work like
a sky above my
head,
possessed by a nameless
acceleration.
17.
I am hungry for the ruins
where I was running
in prehistory,
I will travel,
motionless.
18.
When I went up the pink granite
toward the summit
I saw the beginning
of Asia,
the intemporal rejoined
us.
There’s nothing closer
to the sacred than
nothingness.
19.
The days are enclosed in
a bottle of aspirins
I tell you, I’m in the
process of dying
the path is not
spectacular
the sun is lying on
the tides of the
century,
that’s called eternity
in the calendar of
Being
… and, in my eyes,
a faded rose.
20.
I will not come back
to hear Ella Fitzgerald
sing over the columns.
Neither will
she.
21.
Clouds pile up,
turn into human
forms
on the bed of rivers
an inscription always dissolves,
then appears again,
as the sky has already
told me.
22.
When no one is waiting for us
any longer, there’s
death,
so faithful.
23.
Broken souls are not
anonymous,
no more than the
geometry reserved
for my naked feet.
24.
There are moments when
the past ceases to be a form
of the present.
Rain and tears
resemble each other.
25.
Syria has always been the mother
of chaos. A land parallel to
all the others. In the epiphany
of a sun to come,
breathless.
26.
The olive tree in Delphi,
next to the temple of Sikiyon,
remembers the oracle
saying that
somewhere in the plain
linking the Red Sea
to the Dead Sea,
music will
displace the sky.
27.
Ruins are relics.
The ligneage being of
little importance,
we’re related to them.
28.
Talal Haydar is closer to the
truth than I am, being of this
place.
He used to pick up
the moon between the stones
and take her to his bed…
These days, he bends to
pick up a flower,
finds traces of blood.
