textos

translated by Hayden Leaman and Patricia Kelso

A long time ago

I heard a drop of blood fall repeatedly, calmly,

a drop of transparent blood, but it was blood:

a drop or a thread

by which stone was sending its message to stone.

The piercing, the present repeated until eternity ( each time, each fraction of time )

in the same precise point of space

(that solidly dark point which is the stone, a likeness compressed from space),

a condensation of the clearest dream that the universe dreams.

A drop of transparent blood

makes tiny particles of the air vibrate;

shifted from their place they leave behind an emptiness to be inlaid

in one wave and another and the next one.

They advance, and crash, and retreat.

One drop that falls is the point of an arrow that hits the heart and pierces it a little:

a little in each repeated instant in which it is

the thread of a liquid diamond

and the weapon to split the darkness:

to be an instrument called a "stroke" which is a word:

a drop which falls with a smooth cutting-edge on the dark shell of thought:

to fall and to roll; to be no longer the same, to be now another:

to be another essence which is not individual-being

but a multitude which is - and is not- a bird:

it gives way to the air, and moves away from it.

A drop which falls is an island: it escapes from a continent and makes its way

within its fragment of eternity-of-uniqueness, towards another continent,

more inaccessible, more anonymous: Inscrutable.

An island which erased its lineage, an island which moves forward without turning,

although it knows that it moves away from its source,

to go irrevocably towards the end.

A drop which falls is called a falling drop:

(previously, and afterwards, it has no name):

a falling drop acquires a limit: it trembles;

everything within it is called a drop,

everything outside it threatens its existence.

A drop is the overflowing border of the form it embraces: it delineates and obscures.

It joins its substance to other substance and falls:

doubting or not, it rushes down:

it draws a line and dances down to its end.

What moves it away from its fellows,

what does not deny its beginnings,

is the force of change.

A drop can, with its existence, challenge the sea: it is a potential sea:

it shelters different landscapes within itself, and even more: it feeds them.

Everything within it moves according to its own impulse:

storms break out but nobody observes them, because they are secret.

A drop that falls moves from within and is detached,

because, being one, its movement never is sufficient to become two.

A drop that falls is detached, and in its journey outwards

is forever united to the place where yearnings are grieving

because, though weightless, they themselves are flesh.