Paradox

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well, then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

— Walt Whitman

I. The Dark Fruit

Night leans toward the abyss,

and in its depth discovers its fruit,

hesitating on the cusp of its thorns,

as if tangled in a leap of faith

that caresses, roughly, doubt;

dismayed among weavings

by a penumbra that devours it endlessly,

aware, perhaps, of its near nothingness,

of the lucid wisdom in its disgrace,

it throws itself into delirious faith

seeking a meaning deeper

than its sad finitude, embraced by eons,

toward which it goes, unwillingly,

to meet it—

tenderly.

Oh humanity, fiery column

that illuminates its own shipwreck,

deformed silhouette that names all things

in its fever for blazing brilliance

except poetry and awareness;

perhaps vessels already burned by sunset,

like a long shadow

that needs no explanation

nor bitter consolation.

Oh fatal fall, oh terrible paradox,

that in its high flight condemns itself,

in clear folly, by reaching the divine;

run aground in blind fervor to kiss paradise

which it destroys itself.

Damp cavern that reflects everything,

replicant of its dungeon,

with its hands engraved on the wind,

of blood and mineral resting in praises

that obey an unknowable pulse,

implacably agonizing,

like a flame between hands

that ends up seducing

its own wavering shadow.

There the creature lies,

among shattered columns

and walls of silence,

eyes encrusted in flame

before the petrification of time,

while a strange breath surrounds it,

like the transparency of a god

ungraspable

in his infinite mourning.

No mercy left, no gleam,

no promise accumulated in ash.

Only an inexorable weight

that pronounces its sentence of silences,

a broken axis that insists on holding

an uninhabitable vastness.

There it stands in its failure,

forehead cracked by lightning,

skin inscribed with golden hieroglyphs,

memory sunk in an ocean

that never learned to name salvation

but still calls it:

Flower, seed, cloud.

Flower, seed, cloud.

Flower, seed, cloud.

A lightning bolt of jubilation that opens,

a fluorescence of unnamable pain,

that laughs at itself,

an ecstasy biting into the dark

like a sea of serpents,

in the midst of a burning solitude,

an untouchable howl collapsing

before its own eternity.