Blue

Three Notes for a Melody
2004

 

translated by Maria Nazos

 

                                      after Paul Auster

 

Not
in the rapture of flames
or the furor of beauty
but—

Between death and dying
what was it glowing bitterly
and bitterly
bound itself to the gazing eye
the profuse bleeding
of a momentous blue.

I want you to feel this blue
color of negation, utter devotion
and nothing else
how it lived inside me all night long
the cruel agony
for nothing else beyond this
and how it grew spreading within me
becoming these words within me.

I want you to feel this blue
color of loneliness and uncertainty
and nothing else
while the air and earth inflame
a sudden blooming
in the irate atmosphere
a swirling in the churning air
that rests nowhere.
I must tell you all about it
I must name this affair for you
since this night is that very color
and that something eternal
which we had forever lost inside it—

Impossible to hear it any longer.

Our language drifts us father away from what we are
every word another place
something that moves
eloquent and adept
more fervently
than the blind eye.

And nowhere among these words we can rest.

Αnd nowhere among these colors resides this blue.

Αnd nothing begins with its mere naming
not even these words
that I keep saying to you -tonight-
strangely emotional
drifted away by this blue
how it has grown inside me
a tender lavish power
spreading from within

and

these words could give you nothing
but the pure contemplation of a color.
And these words could give you nothing
but the volatile horizon
where we refuse to believe
that they had failed us—

As if these words have never been.

As if this blue never was.

 

 

     Three Notes for a Melody, Nefeli Publications, Athens, 2004

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