Valerie Mejer Caso

Nothing's in the nest. No needles. No newborn ravens. Maybe something like night in the deep hollow, an eggshell planet, cracked in the middle, an empty bowl of soup. Nothing's in the nest. No thread. No webs of words. Maybe something like my navel, the eclipse of a magnifying glass. A slice, mute with regard to its empty depths. In the nest, nothing. The web unwoven. Dismembered. In the space, something, yes. A piece of cloth. Sounding like flags taking wing, a worm in its beak and suddenly, eyes, my eyes which, cutting across the empty air, direct themselves at something noiseless over there.

In green water I saw your eye and in it I saw that Arabian palace filled with birds and broken glass. I copy an address into my right hand and fill myself with memories of psalms. A green fish emerges from seaweed as seaweed from a wave that rises like the wailing wall. My sun-baked body at the edge, wind in my lungs, its whistle, my torn world, my grief, my soggy passport, my shell with no pearl, you lift them, delicate cloud, into a liquid world. Last night I dreamed of my father's flabby body and of my blue resolve to run away, to find a way, I dreamed of your eye and for an instant I found the vertex of the road, the imaginary line that falls across the earth: that meridian where the sun on a tiger's back meets the shade at its belly. Waking up, we are swallowed by wakefulness. The house swallows us in its terrible thirst. The routine of taking our children to school swallows us and so does the if only I could. There was something to that dream. You know it. A direction. A way. A forest as green as you and your roots. Give me your premonitions, give me your book, give me your prodigious memory, give me the blue gaze from your dark eye, give me the devotion of your sleeping birds. Sometimes the way is a fire through which the circus tiger leaps, a perfect circle returning to me with its stripes intact and with the endless continuity of this ineluctably feral world.

On paunchy green hills in some province of China, you are the one I speak to. Someone buys a perfume, recalling that the bones of his beloved are small. When he writes the note, when he wraps the little bottle, he takes that into account. So do I. The subtlest trace of mind against your shoulders is your true skin. And I press myself to you. I hear the steady rhythm of your typing, the key of a borrowed pulse. But what difference does it make, that it is given? For a while it is mine to use, then your turn, but the pulse originates in the Child of Heaven who has hearts to spare. Some day you'll sink yourself into a frozen lake where paper ships were torched with the names of the missing. Some dead, some vanished. The flames consume all but the wisp of smoke on which a single word rises and water licks at the rest. So we are freed from a weight. Perennially your hills are filled with birds. Green hills, the deep mosses around your temples. They, the birds, are your faithful ones. As I am, naturally. Faithful to a world unknown, a world for us alone, paper-thin, and too fragile to speak of.