Desire for the Word

By: Alejandra Pizarnik

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Night, the night again, the magisterial wisdom of the dark. The warm brush of death—a moment of ecstasy for me, heir to every forbidden garden.

Footsteps and voices from the shadowy corners of the garden. Laughter inside the walls. Don’t believe they’re alive. Don’t believe they’re not alive. At any moment, the crack in the wall, the abrupt disbanding from the little girls I used to be.

Little paper girls of various colors are falling from the sky. Can colors speak? Can paper images speak? Only the gold ones speak, but there are no more of those around.

I walk through sloping walls, walls that conjoin. From dust till daybreak, chanting, If someone didn’t show up, it’s because they didn’t. I ask. Whom? She claims to ask, she wants to know whom she is asking. You don’t speak with anyone anymore. A stranger to death she is dying. Those who are dying have a language of their own.

I have wasted my gift for transfiguring exiles. (I can feel their breathing inside the walls.) Impossible to describe my days or my ways. But in her absolute solitude, she considers the nakedness of these high walls. There are no flowers there, and not even a miracle could make them grow. On a diet of bread and water for life.

At the height of happiness, I have spoken of a music never heard before. So what? If only I could live in a continual state of ecstasy, shaping the body of the poem with my own, rescuing every phrase with my days and weeks, imbuing the poem with my breath while feeding the letters of its every word into the offering in this ceremony of living.

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You can complement this prose poem with a recent article published on this page about this great poet and her works—The Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik.