Ah life! Does no one answer? His words rolled, bolts of lightning etched in years that were boulders and now are mist. Life never answers. It has no ears and doesn't hear us; it doesn't speak, it has no tongue. It neither goes nor stays; we are the ones who speak, the ones who go, while we hear from echo to echo, year to year, our words rolling through a tunnel with no end.

That which we call life hears itself within us, speaks with our tongues, and through us, knows itself. As we portray it, we become its mirror, we invent it. An invention of an invention: it creates us without knowing what it has created, we are an accident that thinks. It is a creature of reflections we create by thinking, and it hurls into fictitious abysses. The depths, the transparencies where it floats or sinks: not life, its idea. It is always on the other side and is always other, has a thousand bodies and none, never moves and never stops, it is born to die, and is born at death.

Is life immortal? Don't ask life, for it doesn't even know what life is. We are the ones who know that one day it too must die and return to the beginning, the inertia of the origin. The end of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the dissipation of time and of nothing, its opposite. Thenwill there be a then? will the primigenious spark light the matrix of the worlds, a perpetual re-beginning of a senseless whirling? No one answers, no one knows. We only know that to live is to live for.

II.

Sudden spring, a girl who wakes on a green bed guarded by thorns; tree of noon, heavy with oranges: your tiny suns, fruits of cool fire, summer gathers them in transparent baskets; the fall is severe, its cold light sharpens its knife against the red maples; Januaries and Februaries: their beards are ice, and their eyes sapphires that April liquefies; the wave that rises, the wave that stretches out, appearances-disappearances on the circular road of the year.

All that we see, all that we forget, the harp of the rain, the inscription of the lightning, the hurried thoughts, reflections turned to birds, the doubts of the path as it meanders, the wailing of the wind as it carves the faces of the mountains, the moon on tiptoe over the lake, the breezes in gardens, the throbbing of night, the camps of stars on the burnt field, the battle of reflections on the white salt flats, the fountain and its monologue, the held breath of outstretched night and the river that entwines it, the pine under the evening star and the waves, instant statues, on the sea, the flock of clouds that the wind herds through drowsy valleys, the peaks, the chasms, time turned to rock, frozen eras, time maker of roses and plutonium, time that makes as it razes.

The ant, the elephant, the spider, and the sheep, our strange world of terrestrial creatures that are born, eat, kill, sleep, play, couple, and somehow know that they die; our world of humanity, far and near, the animal with eyes in its hands that tunnels through the past and examines the future, with its histories and uncertainties, the ecstasy of the saint, the sophisms of the evil, the elation of lovers, their meetings, their contentions, the insomnia of the old man counting his mistakes, the criminal and the just: a double enigma, the Father of the People, his crematory parks, his forests of gallows and obelisks of skulls, the victorious and the defeated, the long sufferings and the one happy moment, the builder of houses and the one who destroys them, this paper where I write, letter by letter, which you glance at with distracted eyes, all of them and all of it, all is the work of time that begins and ends,

III.

From birth to death time surrounds us with its intangible walls. We fall with the centuries, the years, the minutes. Is time only a falling, only a wall? For a moment, sometimes, we see not with our eyes but with our thoughts time resting in a pause. The world half-opens and we glimpse the immaculate kingdom, the pure forms, presences unmoving, floating on the hour, a river stopped: truth, beauty, numbers, ideas and goodness, a word buried in our century. A moment without weight or duration, a moment outside the moment: thought sees, our eyes think.

Triangles, cubes, the sphere, the pyramid and the other geometrical figures thought and drawn by mortal eyes but which have been here since the beginning, are, still legible, the world, its secret writing, the reason and the origin of the turning of things, the axis of the changes, the unsupported pivot that rests on itself, a reality without a shadow. The poem, the piece of music, the theorem, unpolluted presences born from the void, are delicate structures built over an abyss: infinities fit into their finite forms, and chaos too is ruled by their hidden symmetry.

Because we know it, we are not an accident: chance, redeemed, returns to order. Tied to the earth and to time, a light and weightless ether, thought supports the worlds and their weight, whirlwinds of suns turned into a handful of signs on a random piece of paper. Wheeling swarms of transparent evidence where the eyes of understanding drink a water simple as water. The universe rhymes with itself, it unfolds and is two and is many without ceasing to be one. Motion, a river that runs endlessly with open eyes through the countries of vertigo there is no above nor below, what is near is far returns to itself without returning, now turned into a fountain of stillness. Tree of blood, man feels, thinks, flowers, and bears strange fruits: words. What is thought and what is felt entwine, we touch ideas, they are bodies and they are numbers.

And while I say what I say time and space fall dizzyingly, restlessly. They fall in themselves. Man and the galaxy return to silence. Does it matter? Yes but it doesn't matter: we know that silence is music and that we are a chord in this concert.

I am a man. Little do I last. And the night is enormous. But I look up. The star is right. Unknowing, I understand. I too am written, and at this very moment, someone spells me out."

Thought
      Fluttering
among these words
                  They are
your footsteps in the next room
the birds that return
The nem tree that protects us
                        protects them
Its branches mute thunder
douse lightning
In its foliage the drought drinks water
They are
       this night
             (this music)
Watch it flow
         between your breasts
falling on your belly
                 white and black
nocturnal spring
                 jasmine and crow's wing
tabla and sitar
           No and Yes
together
     two syllables in love
If the world is real
                  the word is unreal
If it is real the word
                    the world
is the cleft the splendor the whirl
No
   the disappearances and the appearances
                                       Yes
the tree of names
              Real unreal
are words
       air they are nothing
Speech
    unreal
makes silence real

       Being still
is a strand of language
                    Silence
seal
   scintilla
            on the forehead
on the lips
          before it evaporates
Appearances and disappearances
Reality and its resurrections
Silence rests in speech