[And if I chose a vessel]
And if I chose a vessel with strange accents of the sea, it’s because I want to be at home everywhere else, even in words most removed from my borrowed soul. The doors of the world have been knocked down for me by a current-of-blood, drift-of-flesh navigation.
Coolie, because my lost memory chooses its roots in my truths.
But I only seize this tongue in so far as it adopts me, to no longer be blocked from the word.
And, at the threshold of French, I vary the way I knock in a different way on vowels and consonants. First and foremost I love words, even more than my wounds.
And I speak my French tongue to point out my home port on the map of my discoveries. Marriage between my oceans and continents at last.
[In the thousand and one nights]
In the thousand and one nights
of a first voyage by sea
I rubbed my lamp of waves
on your passing isle.
The nomad likes to watch
the orchard, the traveler
likes to find his fruits again in the night.
Yet already I remember each golden scale
stuck to your hands–
woman is a seascape
her water sac is a first voyage
woman is a vessel
her blue flow is a tide of flesh
every woman is a map
(with only the route left to plan).
[With no ransom]
With no ransom to spread out the clouds
the first words tumbled
like pebbles on the dust
of the storm.
And my dove, lost in a lightning flash
anchored my dreams and ether keels.
Anjali said, the vessel is scuttle-prone
from our hurried departures–
a send-off with handkerchief raised
by a nail-eater
a sword-swallower
someone who walks on fire.
And my syllable is a still bridge
where the north takes over the south again
as far as the cardinal point of the bird.
Anjali, the only imagined vanishing act:
and at the mandolin’s sound
may your chest rise in a star’s fine reflection
to soothe the mothers of my crew.
[The horizon]
for Gandhi
The horizon was a more delicate pink
than the first seashells’ exquisite skin.
And the sharpest of stars, by chance,
began to invent sea urchins on the sand.
[If the sea]
If the sea
were cut off from the sands,
I’d get it back.
If ocean foam
were faster than clouds,
I’d embrace it
on the sweet golden hooves
of the sun.
If the light were
ghazal
or mantra,
I’d hoard it all.
The sea, Mahabharata!
[So sensitive were my first words]
So sensitive were my first words
that the creole patois burned
my fibers: I lent my throat to the mute cry
of sea men torn apart by the whip’s bite.