“I have the impression of moving in the shadow of syllables, in regions before secrets, where language cannot yet answer the call of thought, in swamps where you risk sinking with every breath.” ~ Edmond Jabès, from The Book of Questions: Volume I, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop

Two for Tuesday: Where Fear Leads Us

“A Comforting Friend” (c1895, oil on canvas)
by Arthur Wardle

                   

Scars

They tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can’t reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.

~ William Stafford

                   

“A Fairy Tale” (nd, oil on canvas)
by Arthur Wardle

Fears

            By Gonzalo De Lerma

The sensation of being the only guest
in a grand hotel on the outskirts of the city
—and hearing the somnambulistic
elevator and a scream—
or being in an empty theater
or in a lonely plaza
of a lonely unknown city
weighed down with suitcases and no money
surrounded  by escaped doves
from the studio of the worst taxidermist
that ridiculous melancholy of one who feels ignored
at the parties of younger people
whom he calls late at night
from a bar with the lights already turned off
and talks to himself about the comforts
of being an academic ghost
of an orchestra conductor

I fear, in the end, that I’ve kissed
The lips of a mistaken goddess

~ Felipe Benitez Reyes

                     

Music by Beth Hart, “Everything Must Change”

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