Creature

            This man that I imagine in my ink is made of crumbled words.  His flesh remembers a lost language.  He states a sentence in motion and silence is scarred over.

            He exists enough to suffer, not enough to complain.  He lives lightly, without fatigue, irrigated by incertitude, and cannot tolerate like us his weight in blood.

            It’s a beginning that doesn’t tarnish though it goes on.  God is of little importance to him, but he weighs the sky as he walks.

            His only obligation is to set the table for improbable guests.

            Like a tree cluttered with birds, with all his might he remains silent and carries his voice in his arms.

            He is only afraid of lying.  Of giving in to certain melodious illusions.  Of looking at himself in the mirror too much.  Of not being attentive enough to the place where words detach from what they say.

            Like a river climbing back to its source, he becomes thinner.  Within him, knowledge and oblivion have mixed their waters.

            He especially loves what he doesn’t know, what resists and drives him to despair.  Patience is his only virtue.

            Night especially is his domain.  Its freshness makes him want to sing.  In it, he learns to depart.

            He must be depicted, sitting in the shadows at a child’s bedside, or standing on a boat, at night, in the middle of a lake.

            Undoubtedly God gets his taste for absence from him.

            First, he was lost, from so many illusions.  He destroyed himself.  Now from a distance he resembles Lazarus because he rose from his own cadaver.

            Henceforth day is motionless in his hands.

            He walks on a wire in his soul.