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Oecus
It happens sometimes when I lie sleepless
on the bed with bronze paws, under the silent lamp:
I hear the slaves rustling and whispering nearby-
didn't the heavy, shadowlike curtain stir just now?
Are they deciding if they dare enter this room
if they dare approach me? I am a stranger here
while they belong to the household. But perhaps they
don't dare
because I am one of the living, because the Oecus
the master's chamber, is forbidden to them and holy?
Maybe it's the major-domo whispering out there:
The raised whisper-someone in the crowd is contentious
is calmed down, reassured. -Dragging steps and silence
I wrap myself in the blankets which disintegrated long
ago
and it. Is that the curtain stirring again?
Or did the lamp flicker? What draft can exist
in this house, close as it is? I am here simply as a person
in need of shelter. Did someone lift the curtain? Or want
something of me?
Sometimes when I wake from my sleep or torpor
I feel as if someone had just touched me
as if someone had awkwardly tried to stroke my hand.
Heard in a dream in the year 63, on the ısth of the
harvest month at night:
"You lie asleep in a sarcophagus with no bottom"-
Half-wakened by these words, neither asleep nor wholly
awake
the marble-coffin comes to my mind more distinctly
its shadows, its shimmering whiteness, a few clear details
RIKA LESSER
first the rough-hewn inner sides, two long, two short:
The stonecutter has not gone to much trouble here
everywhere chisel-marks show, the corners are round
He seems to have bestowed all his skill on the outside
with its fruits flowers birds dolphins bucrania
its fragments of myths: two figures sailing in scallops,
holding veils filled with wind over their heads
I am searching for my name-then with the clear logic
of the dream it strikes me: since the coffin has no bottom
it must also lack a lid. And he who rests there
lies with his back against Nothing and his face toward
Nothing.
Only the force field of the four walls holds the sleeper
floating between the bare interior's demand to forgo
and the power of the exterior, ornate with myths, to
desire-
Virgin, O Atokos, when this force field will be broken
let me, in the dream, be neither reborn nor begotten
What came before this has no scars from chisels.
What is to come has no fruits or flowers.
GHAZAL
To live one's life with an Angel, alone, in Night
withdrawn
is to see light through a keyhole and oneself be No One
To live without angels is to have keys in the locks
not to see Day, elbow forward, kiss hands and be no one
Surgeon! You, who had the sharpest knife of all
your hand did not tremble when you severed All from
No One!
This mound of stones was my house. It had one chamber
windowless, and a keyhole with no key. No one
cared about how or when I disappeared:
Busy as they were sorting sheep it concerned no one
but when the squabble was through and they'd drunk
themselves blind
and shot off their rifles in the Square, there was no one