Bread and Love (Part 2)

Update: The below is the second of a two-part story. You can read the first part here.

I

Once words have simmered in the pot, leave to stand.

II

I wonder
as I stir the corpse with a spoon, I wonder
whether there is
an animal lurking inside my heart and where the boundary lies
between a very long scream and a long silence.

III

I wonder: if the sun stretches out enough to reach the skin of a potato and I stretch out enough to reach the sun, then maybe I could make someone love me. If one day I were to wake up as an anemone searching for the depths of the sea, I would be no different from what I am right now: a wrinkled body searching for the depths of another body.

IV

I learnt to feel hunger before I learnt to feel cold, from the voice of someone next to me.

V

If I think back to my first memory of hunger, hunger was yellow and she crawled. Before becoming a lump that sticks to fingers and organs, hunger was a window because the world was silent and I learnt to speak. From the mouth of my stomach, I learnt to speak.

VI

If I learnt to speak it was not of my own accord, but because you first started crying for Mum. If you hadn’t cried out in hunger, I wouldn’t have felt mine. But because you had cried out and they took you away from me to feed you, I learnt to cry out. I cried for Mum in hunger so as to be taken with you.

VII

Sometimes we need a different voice because ours we had drowned one night by someone who didn’t feed us.

VIII

You come to me when it no longer is 10 am or 3 pm but another dead hour. You come into my house; I gave you the keys in case of emergency. You see me on the sofa stretching out to reach the sun. I explain: “I’m trying to get someone to love me”.

IX

Sometimes we need a different voice because ours we chose to have drowned by someone who didn’t feed us and then you, the person whom I learnt hunger from, bring me strawberries and say “I love you and I brought strawberries.”

X

Staving off hunger once more because hunger never ends but can be postponed.

XI

You say “it is enough for my friendship with you that you exist”.

XII

I’ll keep you alive with a lemon sponge cake and a glass of cold water every morning after dancing.

Take my chest, my back and my hands if you would like to inhabit a new body on those days when you wake up tired of yours.

XIII

I do not perpetuate any Christian tradition of sacrifice and charity for the endurance of souls, but I do believe in your tiredness and in your tears when you come carrying your sorrow in a bread basket under your arm.

I will build for you a house of glass.

I will build for you a house where we can both fit in case one day you are so tired that you don’t want to go out anymore.

XIV

I will set the table, put out the cake, strawberries, and cold water.

“It is important for me that you exist”, and I’ll keep you alive.

As Dusk Falls

Instructions from hunger

1. The mouth
   opens twists and bites itself
   the mouth
   wakes up because something itches something itches
   at the centre of the palate feels
   the sting like a splinter
   the mouth
   gets scratched by teeth the palate and tongues scream and
   the mouth
   expands leaves the stomach crawls out and bites into a lung it seeks
   the mouth seeks
   the fruit the mouth grows
   expands and finds it always finds
   the beating fruit and the mouth
   sees its fruit hidden behind the lung. The tongues moan
   and the mouth
   tears the skin off and air rushes out and
   fills the throat which itches and itches and the mouth
   approaches the fruit climbing up the shredded flesh from the lung.
2. On the fruit: the mouth recognises it in its beating. It may rest behind the lung or it could be concealed under the skin on hands and the mouth would seek it following its beat. The mouth would crawl all over the body and skin and would bite into flesh digging for its hidden fruit.
3. Words are the fruit.

In Darkness

I want to write today one of those bright and fresh poems where nothing ever happens. Where there are only fountains and children running around them and adults sitting on benches smoking, thinking about old grudges and loves or how sad summer is when you’re not a child running around a fountain.

I’d want it to be for you the shadow of a fig tree.

Summer has not yet begun and we still have time. We could still be young, in this poem.

Ghosts

I write to you,

This is just an excuse to talk to you. I will reflect here on language and the body, focusing on migratory theories of desire, strategically introducing quotes from Barthes, so that other people reading this are content and don’t think that this is just an excuse to talk to you.

«Love has of course a complicity with my language (which maintains it), but it cannot be lodged in my writing».

There is a double dimension in bodies that worries me: the pile of stones in my throat which maintains silence, and the pond of stagnant water in my belly in which words also accumulate.

(Today I ate pasta. I went for a walk and the sky was so full of clouds that the heat came out of the cobblestones and was not able to rise and so remained circling around our heads)

If language is a skin, as Barthes says, then I admit that my body is only complete when you listen to it.

(I would have liked to talk to you today about work and my wrists. My wrists are aching again and I’m waiting to hear back from a new, better job. I talk to you in the same way you say ghosts talk, striking you with my absence. I would have liked to tell you “I’m very happy I think I’ve finally figured out what I’d like to do in life” and then “my wrists are feeling stiff again”)

«It has taken many accidents, many surprising coincidences, for me to find the Image which, out of a thousand, suits my desire».

The Image which suits my desire finds and melts the stones
in my throat.
The Image which suits my desire floats calmly in the pond
of my belly.

(After dinner, I came up to my room and opened the windows. There was a man on a terrace talking to someone over the phone asking them if they loved him. I would also have liked to call you to tell you this, and to tell you “if I can hear this man I’m sure he heard me ask you the same question when I was talking to you over the phone on the terrace last week”)

I write this poem and throw it forward in time. When you read it and all those people who like Barthes read it, I hope they will speculate on the meaning of the stones and the pond and you will just think, poor her, I wasn’t beside her when she was missing me, when her wrists hurt.

I Am Glad He Never Said Good-bye

I don’t know everything about you I don’t know
how long you can hold your breath
underwater or the way
you cry
never
ever have I seen you in a pool and never
ever have I seen you cry.

If you asked me to slice my arms open and tear
my flesh from veins
and pull my bones apart one by one
and put my fingers in my wounds to let it gush out
my blood
and draw my blood out for you to drink or to wash your feet or
to water
the flowers on your balcony and let my blood
run down the streets mix with the rain
be licked by dogs
and cats and pigeons
and all the dirty street animals we always see
when we walk hand in hand and you say
“I feel so sorry
for all the dirty street animals”
I would give you my blood.

If you came to me as a fish
and asked me for my blood
I would give it to you
but you have never
been a fish
nor have I ever seen you cry and never
ever have you asked me for my blood
and for that I am grateful.

I am grateful for
the bread and the water
and the flowers
and
that you never asked for my blood
(you know I would have given it to you).

XV

Words are sliced on the wooden board and placed with the rest of the ingredients
tomato onion
garlic oil
cucumber
water and salt
inside the poem.

XVI

We carry the weight of the sun, the long wait until dinner, the irremediable existence of each other. We carry the violence, the loneliness and the beating heart of our other half, love. I feel your heart like a clock that marks every single one of my meals. I feel your heart like the mole that eats me from the inside,

love.

XVII

Now that it’s dark outside and,
tangled up on the sofa with you,
I could be anyone else my hand
could be any other hand
I could change my breathing
to match someone else’s and the rumbling of my stomach is
the only thing that would give me my name
stay the night and let’s make dinner.

XVIII

To gain consistency, beat the words well. Measure the amount of water. Add salt and pepper to taste and beat well. Beat well until lumps and words are blended into a liquid poem. Use oil and garlic sparingly. Beat well.

XIX

Let stand for an hour. Sit and wait next to the body of a loved one.

What will we have for breakfast tomorrow?

NOTES

Passage XI cites Simone Weil’s essay Waiting for God.

The passage “Ghosts” cites Roland Barthes’ essay A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.

The passage “I am glad he never said good-bye” owes its title to H.D.’s poem In the Rain, part 2.

Text was inspired by Janice Galloway’s novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing.