1. Words

A day comes when unhappiness has a name.
Then it seems as if that which we haven’t understood and that
which we won’t ever understand could be condensed
in a single verb, in a single sentence
that describes the profile of a garnet absence and summarizes
all the shadows of earlier absences.
And the words, they are important. But nothing is
the ‘most’ important. And thus, in Ewe language
and depending on the tone,
we can say “to say”, “to be sad” and “to sleep”
with the same syllable.
The day when unhappiness has already received a name,
we realize, nevertheless, that happiness
also lacks a name.
Then, if we see properly, we see names of the moments
as happy as ants, some of them heaped in a pile and rowdy
on a biscuit crumb, and others scattered and small,
lost, explorers of unforeseen circumstances,
sons of Tarahumara indians who survive without
working.
For me each ant is your reminiscence.

2. Watercolour

It’s not that you would have taken too much
time to paint it,
the thing is that you did it with care.
It took infinite time within brevity,
the hand’s tremor subjected to invisible bridles
exuding with breath, saliva, tear ducts,
and a bit of river.
And then, just at the point when you were finishing, the gust of wind,
or an exhaust pipe
or a negligent oblivion
or a clumsy movement
took away that paper full of colours, of similes.
As a dry leaf dressed to be married
oscillated in risible whirls like the sneezes of an ogre,
descending down to the pit that had been its model.
With wet knees, and blurred world on the fingers,
you realized that the summer
had arrived.

3. Pronouns up on a boat

I wouldn’t like to talk only about me, not even about me being you, right now.
In the eyes of the ox the sea is and isn’t: a back-and-forth of waves
of elastine – the scleroprotein of the tendons. So much of swinging
to remain in a place. And in the periscope, a boat’s stern
and a seagull that seems to be coming near to peck my nose.
When the days are bright and I can go out on the deck, I smell
the scents of iodine and the dolphins. The anxious brushing of the iron
with the water, the wind’s jealousness.
But I can only speak about myself and you that is me right now,
I can’t say anything that would enable the understanding of one of these dilemmas
for which the people kill each other, not even show anyone the way to
the pleasure which is drunk in gulps, not even say what is the price
of these or the other things that are bought and lost and
are searched with longing. Not even if we have done right, not even if not.
And now when I speak only about you and when you are me, I want
to generalize us and serve some cause that would have the eyes
of an infant when I confront it with the reason’s mirror – which is not a
microscope. But I do not know enough of physics, not even the rationale why chemistry
has the anchorage of a skin and makes pronouns for us, which are indefinite
weak and relative, like the horizon. Without arguments,
without rings, without astrolabs, without repentance.
And now without you. I.

(Trans. Sameer Rawal)