For, blood is a magical and inauspicious liquid. Just as it renders
armor spotless, those who drink it grow in others’ eyes.

He crumpled his antennae in a kind show of mercy. When he stopped
to look at me, I saw his awful face—what an awful face
it was! He was clearly the king of insects. For, kingship
can maim even a face small as an insect’s.

This is how I realized I was on the right track. I removed
my eyes, thrust them underneath the earth. The purple insect
entered his underground palace through a hole.

I saw that
insects constantly rushed around
taking themselves far too seriously. They rolled
inside earth’s corridors like crumbs of god,
forgetting that they were insects, that they would, no matter what,
remain insects.

Observing more carefully, I understood why they were in such a hurry.
There, downstairs, in earth’s enormous jail,
all the butterflies lay captured by grim mosquitoes.
They were struggling, scraping the earth
to reach the light, where their colors would show.
In vain…

Butterflies are dateless things…
When their tiny flesh, softer than earth, is touched
by the stingers of poisonous insects, they wriggle, twist and bend,
abandon their fuzz to dark corridors. Grizzly insect guards
catch the fuzz, try to attach it
to their own flesh. When the fuzz doesn’t stick
they get angry, they attack the butterflies all over again.
The piles of dead butterflies,
having failed to change the laws of the earth,
collapse on top of one another,
about to become
a more valuable fertilizer than the earth deserves…

The purple insect gave an order to his zealous, poisonous soldiers.
I think they noticed me. They suddenly charged.
Before I could retrieve my eye from underneath the ground…

Black Swan

One of the brainless soldiers had obviously stung me in the eye.
That’s it: I must have passed out and rolled down
the green hill. Otherwise, how could I have reached this luminous lake
all by myself? In any case, my eyes hurt now,
my eyes that bleed with every massacre they witness,
that ache after every massacre.

I must wash my eyes in the light. For, every eye that runs to the light
learns to repose within itself, to wash itself
with its own water.
Just like swans, who must learn
to rest their necks within their own bodies…

Just as being a swan crossed my mind—
a black swan in the lake.
It stopped in the middle of the lake, silently parting the water.

The white swans moved with customary beauty.
Traced the shoreline.
They were close enough to the earth to be touched,
admired, talked about.
The black swan—at a spot equidistant from each arc of shore.

Too proud to worry about being proud,
too detached to waste time admiring herself.
Since she will drown in an enchanting blackness
if she looks at herself,
she has learned at a very young age not to stare
into the distance.
Her mother surely told her
the unfortunate history of black swans that admire themselves.