Body, Words

(Photo by EK)

... Dry casques of departed locusts
speaking a shell of speech... The words rattle: shells given out by shells.
                                                                            Ezra Pound, from Canto VII

... there is no promised land beyond the body; beyond the word.
                                    Eugénio de Andrade, from "Lines of Winter"



How often indeed we seem to live beyond them, empty shells, time-worn things.

Yet there is nothing like an intimation of grief and loss, followed by a self-imposed interruption to the ruthless order of things, to bring you to your senses.

To remind you that even your neglected language has a body, a physicality of its own. Living matter.

A pliant tongue, slowly caressing you as it once did, as when reading Eugénio, hopelessly in love, would bring you to tears.

*       *       *

Words

They are like a crystal,
words.
Some a dagger,
some a blaze.
Others,
merely dew.

Secret they come, full of memory.
Insecurely they sail:
cockleboats or kisses,
the waters trembling.

Abandoned, innocent,
weightless.
They are woven of light.
They are the night.
And even pallid
they recall green paradise.

Who hears them? Who
gathers them, thus,
cruel, shapeless,
in their pure shells?

Eugénio de Andrade, "Palavras" [Words], translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin. From Inhabited Heart (LA: Perivale Press, 1985).