The Word for Desire
by Alejandra Pizarnik
translated by Yvette Siegert
This spectral texture of darkness, this melody in my bones, this
breath from various silences, this going deeper and deeper, this dark,
dark gallery, this sinking without sinking.
What am I saying? It's dark now and I want to go inside. I don't
know what else to say. (And I don't want to say anything, I just want
to go inside.) The ache in my bones. The language broken by spades
—now reconstructing, bit by bit, a diagram of the unreal.
I have no possessions. (This is certain; at last, something certain.)
Then a melody. It's a plaintive melody, a lilac light—imminence
without a recipient. I see the melody. The presence of an orange light.
Without your eyes, I won't know how to live—this is also certain.
I give you life, I revive you. And I was told to step out into the wind
and knock on doors in search of them.
I walk past, naked, holding a taper. A cold castle, the garden of
earthly delights. Solitude doesn't mean standing on a pier early in
the morning, eagerly looking out over the water. Solitude is not being
able to articulate the solitude, being unable to circumvent it, unable
to give it a face, unable to make it a synonym for any landscape. Sol-
itude would be this torn melody of my phrases.
From Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert (New Directions, 2016).
WOW! This shows all a poem can be. The diction, the brokenness, the whole of it. WOW!
favourite poet of all time 💛