In the face of darkness, this secluded space is a pathology
likewise to live alone in it.
My heart keeps failing in bits, as the voice from the evening news,
crisp as snowflakes, announces that twitter
has just been banned in my country.
It’s close to bedtime, and my lover is on his knees,
hunched over the bed on the other side
praying in a language only he understands.
Empty tonight, I remember walking with my father to the cardiologist’s
six years ago, after I’d fallen for the fourth time,
off the cliff of a hill,
my feet devoid of sensations, my head swirling
as in a circumventing tornado.
When the doctor asked me to describe the pain in my chest,
I think I said: angina.
I think I said: pectoris.
I think I said: there is an elephant on my chest.
I can’t remember which now.
But I’m sure he heard: my heart is clean and white as silk.
And muttered in reply: I know. I know.
After praying, my lover tells me he feels God has listened too much
to my arrhythmic heartbeats,
God sees your racing heart, he whispers.
Why not tell him something he has never seen?
He proceeds to talk to God again, about twitter,
and starts with: a country, velvety red. Blood red.
Red of the marooned. Red of the shipwrecked.
Red of oxygenated blood,
stuck within the perimeters of an endangered heart.
There is a trembling inside the both of us
precipitated by silence.
We can’t find more words for God than these.
This is where language begins. This is where language ends.