To Mark Strand

 

He used to say: this ashen face, the firm skin over fragile bones, the hand trembling alone without an external stimuli, the nose that drips what is left of its meagre elixir inside the skull, the gazes that return shaken images to the valiant quarry workers, the belly that gurgles without receiving any food or water, the futility that equals in its dark severity the flower and the bullet; all of this is nothing. Nothing. The days and the nights and the heat and the cold did not dry the drops of my mother’s milk which lingered on my lips. I am still her favourite bird, who returns back in the spring with a straw in his mouth and rebuilds his abandoned nest.