Will I still be able to write the poems
that I never wrote
all these years of ashes and smoke?
Will I still find a strand of youth
concealed between the world’s words
without nights of tar to drown it,
without thick locks to fasten
the ants sketched in my thoughts by illness?
If only I had
a civilized technique for survival,
(I hear it haunts us, it isn’t a ghost,
it walks around here on earth!)
If only I knew how to lose my shadow on time
if only I knew how to point myself out with my finger,
to give myself up to the police,
if only I had taken the road of the church
or perfected my own Karenina complex . . .
But not before everything caught on fire, page by page,
In order to wrench me out of all the letters that wrote me.

This frozen weariness in my neck
and the heartbeat
more and more distant
underneath the wheels of the same invalid train