THE SHAPES OF THE SOUL

Raquel Angel-Nagler

REMEMBERING SILVIA PLATH

***

The knotted air, the choking window.
A woman steps ouut of a carpet desiggn,
Her breath heavy,
Bubbles low softly from the picture of a sea,
The bubbles protect her from the weather in the room.
Maybe she came from very far,
When people breathed water, glittering bubble,
When some people, small, humble,
Crawled out of the water.
They cried long before words were invented,
The cry was human,
It invented all the words that exist,
It invented the word 'fear',
It invented the danger of love.

***

Woman, so alone,
You want to control the weather in your room,
The weather inside you.
You want tidy seasons, tidy feelings,
You want tidy love.
Woman, alone,
Life is a messy place.
Memories, the forgetting, the closeness, the distances,
The cries entangled, fireworks of echoes,
And you have no choice,
Whatever gesture you do defeats you.
Woman, alone,
In a continent between order and chaos
We live, we love if we are lucky,
If the order paints what the small beauties, the flour leaking through the cracks of our fingers,
If the chaos paints the exquisite truth inside us: a bird of passion,
Smuggler of dreams,
Smuggler of love.

***

You find time left in a carcass of silence.
You weep over the carcass of your childhood.
This carcass carried who you were, who you wanted to be,
Before the world told you how you should be.
You don't know if the carcass remembers,
If there is someone there when it sighs.
It is you. It is you.
No one can cross the memories and remain the same,
No one can die so many times in each forgetting, and remain the same.
Little carcass,
Why didn't you fear the future,
Why you felt the tremor of loosing the past.
Young carcass, toy of life,
You let the others choose who you are,
You were too young, too unprepared to choose yourself.
Young carcass,
Who are you when nobody sees.

***

In the biggest circus of the world: life,
You rope climber, you sold whatever you had, only the tremor remained,
You tiptoe on the rope,
The only safety net is fear.
The woman rubber sucked, squeezes all her hungers in a black box,
And the clown, wrapped in himself, the eyes of a child: bigger than his life,
The red painted tear, the red painted laughter.
He sits like a small bent Atlas.
No one knows what the clown senses,
From which cave of feeling he crawled out piece by piece.
People come to the circus two by two,
The cannot resist what the clown knows
Alone.

***

The insomnia is everywhere.
The night is alive,
When you look inside you, you are awake.
The moon walks over the void, the mad circus of the night
You lie,
Dreams tell you the myths of origin, the story of who you are,
The centuries of the tribe continue, continue,
They are here, they left long ago.
The insomnia made peace with your madness,
It whispers you are, you are.
The insomnia, the eyes open out, open in,
What does it see, what does it remember,
What dead ends it senses, what green traffic lights
Sounds: a cry begins before words were invented,
Women in labor, children that were not born yet.
Day comes,
The light blinds the insomnia, it blinds who you are.
Day comes,
People, gestures, they are sleepless,
They have to rush, to sell their hands finger by finger,
The mind ,piece by piece,
In order to live,
Time is a plate of soup on the table.
They have to repeat everything, each motion,
In order to be different,
The big strangers of the world,
And the insomnia defeats itself, it is always the same,
Each madness from the beginning,
Each someone who was you,
Always from the beginning.
In the big arena,
Insomnia is tangles with insanity,
Their hands tangled with pain, the fingers leak from the hands,
And you don't know if there is a conqueror, who is the conqueror,
You don't know if insanity is free.

***

Mother,
You bore me in a white room,
How much white to hide the shadows.
There is no sound, only the silence cries, shouts.
We are so close, so far, the equation of the infinite.
Mother,
They twisted your womb, your body: a sinner, a saint.
They sooth you, they give you sleep, they give you forgetting,
And I drown in your liquid womb, a river of wombs,
The bubbles in my breath, water flowing into your fear.
It's night.
Your womb pushed me out,
You don't know how much the light can hurt.
You are empty ,broken,
And you don't know where to find the pieces that wereyou.
It's night,
And I don't know who will guard my life, the place where memories come.
Silence. Lips that continue a caravan of pain always closer,
And I don't know who will guard what I forget.
Mother,
I am in your arms, I am heavy,
There is no child that is really light,
I am in your arms, and I am alone,
I don't know where loneliness begins, in which deafness, in which mouth-less words.
Someone watches us,
I don't know who watches, who sees, what he sees,
I don't know if he sees the thousand years inside a child,
The thousand years inside the womb.

***

All around :the horizon, dissolving. Dissolving like hope.
In the fields beyond tall and low,
My shadow running from me, even when it runs towards me.
I don't know why the solitude is so quiet, so still,
As if it was the only space to know who I am.

In the field beyond good and bad,
The shadow cries:
I see you, I see you, you are real.
The horizon murmurs: I am frail, I am frail.
Winds blow the way life does,
From all directions at once.
It says:
Live where it's dangerous,
At the edge of power, at the edge of pain.

In the field beyond right and wrong
I came to a patch of mud and water,
Water clear as silence, the mud unstirred.
My face in the mud in the water,
I cry: I am, I am.

***

A body of mist, delicate, invisible.
My hands come from pain, strong from pain.
I clean the world: a square in my daily walk. The world is visible.
Today, everything is as it always is: no glory descendent.
Today, again, I have to choose:
To love each time from the beginning,
To open my palm, the ten fingers of touch,
To sense what was done, what should be done,
Or to form a fist, the caves of blind wind,
To feel the rage that began even before I began.
I have to choose the motions, the moments.
The fatigue of choosing is immense,
Annd there is no god to choose for me.

***

The big noise of stone is everywhere.
In the sad suburbs people are used to the noise,
It is the advantages of being poor,
And these people are there,
In the place where everything hardens,
They learn to live where they fear.
Metal and coal fall where gravity falls,
There is gravity in the men too,
It pulls them, their legs: bent metal.
Everything tends to the eternal facts:
The endless work of metal to be roof, a shed,
The endless work of steal to be power,
The endless hands of man, oily, cracked, deep.
The hands that make them beautiful.

***

Morning.
Our faces soft, cracked,
The face of someone digging the earth.
The hair knotted, muddy.
The face digging among memories, and it doesn't find itself.
The face digging in its skull. It is not there.
There are beginnings beyond imagination,
Everything began in fear,
Everything began where it was dangerous to live.
The eternities of thirst continue, we miss ourselves.
You survive time,
Time falls from your face like cracked rain.
There are no answers because the questions are not enough.
You breath the trenched lines of time in your face.
You breath the rage for a line in a map.
The rage sticks to your cry,
And you don't know how to choose: the cry chooses you, it takes you wherever it wants,
You don't know how silent can a cry be.

***

In the market
Animals are cheap,
They put their life on fire, like am ancient martyr.
In the piazza, a hunter in his sad fur,
The only shield available.
The fire, the sun strike him like the cries before wars were invented.
The pain repeats one word:
I hurt, I exist.
He fell, all the gravities of a man in his body,
Into a marsh of entrails, mad flies in his eye lids.
He didn't know that when there is no god,
Death is so easy.
He didn't know how easy it is to become soil.
The smell of entrails, tangled with his death, moving, moving.

***

It was on the other side of time.
The sea exploded beyond limits.
It was on the other side of time.
The faces of the drowned, leftovers of life, cries rot.
They roll, belly up, like dead fish, hopeless,
They never learned how to breath water.
It was on the other side of time,
On the water, fingers embroidered a cloth finer than mist ,a flag, a shroud,
As if they knew it was the right of the dying.
How can something end when it is so full of beginning.
It was on the other side of time.
Water-colored souls laced in all the shapes of coral, the sunken centuries.
The fishermen were from this side of time,
Fishers of small loves, liquid pollen, green and blue.
They said they knew the place,
It wandered into their time, like a dream,
Their dreams saw, knew faces from the beginning.
The place floated into their time, cleaned by the pollen, the thighs of love.
A solitude,
Soothing as the paper boat of a child.
It was exquisite.

***


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