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subjunctive
i want so much to listen to myself,
but i fear i might speak a language i will not understand.
all voices silenced, however,
perhaps i'll find some time with myself and then
share fears, desires,
but above all the understanding
that i've been helplessly placed in the world
and will be removed from it.
or else this world is but one
among many, and it might not even exist.
you, me, our images on the mirror of time, always cracking.
perhaps we exist only as an intention.
a fact may fail to be.
the light on things is the sole guarantee of existence whatsoever:
while and only while light is shining.
this is it: we are just the contrast of light and shadow,
and the memory of shadow and of light.
who would render a precise description of a sun beam on one's self?
on another? i say nothing.
i'm powerless. we all are.
as contrasts, we are a story without an end. and
a story that is not told to its end does not fulfill itself.
excerpt - Elizabeth Bishop At the fishhouses
(...) The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.