34
Here is just one of the entrances
Here is just one of the entrances. During stolen hours and
on rainy days, darkness covers me in a humming. A flame,
which ends what began, cools my cheek. I’m only a
gathering of thoughts, a trembling of tiny wings, a fleeting
attempt to attach a body to the windy crossroads. Here is
just one of the exits. Here is where I break a stick off of
silence, prod the beehive.
Nature knows that the color of pain is green. It doesn’t
know the concept of consolation and it buds from dry
stumps and cracks in the asphalt, from rotten leaves in the
gutter and the contact of the ground. Three bears frozen
mid-fall on a canvas by Walton Ford. Three bears chased up
a tree by farmers, who lit a fire below. Three bear cubs. The
first calls me a hunter. The second calls me a fall. The third
calls me a brother. On the canvas they are frozen mid-fall.
It is I who plummet in front of the canvas.
A biting stick, pushed between the patient’s teeth during a
surgery without anesthesia. I write one night to expunge
everything in the next one until it hurts. My teeth are
getting looser. Why does the stick rest? Where do the
letters fall out? And anyway, who are you?
In an unfortunately lost note for the report from the
Siberian expedition in 1829, Alexander von Humboldt