Anonymous cosmic beings, I am calling you from a field at night where the frost looks like breathing glass over the grass and the sky hangs so low I could touch it with my forehead, if it did not hurt so much; far off the mountain shows its dark back, and down here a circle of initiation bonfires dies down and flares again like a tired eyelid, leaving in the air a smell of burned resin that mixes with the sour milk of the cows now sleeping, with the cold metal of tools forgotten on the post, with the dampness rising from the furrows.
In cauda semper stat venenum. I have tried to pronounce it without faith, testing the endurance of a word against the wind, yet the phrase returns with the stubbornness of a splinter under the nail. You sought rest in the skeleton of the mountain and did not find it… I tell myself, or I tell it to someone I do not know is me, while I watch how the ember covers itself in ash and still keeps a red heart… there is a watchful country silence, dogs that do not bark, only listen, an owl crossing like torn paper, the road so far away its murmur arrives like a someone else’s idea; and I have brought a folded sheet and set it on my knee, I write slowly because the cold numbs my fingers and because in each word I feel the risk of a promise I will not know how to keep to you, to you who may read from another matter, from another age of the universe, and do not know the weight of a night without firewood nor the way skin learns to remember ice even when dawn comes.
You crossed through every memory looking for its water to make dew of crosses and roses, that line has pursued me since before the ceremony, since before the men of the village painted their palms with soot and repeated ancient names without fully understanding them, as if meaning were a beast tamed by repetition; and I watched them and I watched myself, and I said I am the witch, I told myself under my breath, not out of pride, out of need, because someone has to hold up the invisible when everyone pretends they do not need it, someone has to accept that memory is a field with puddles that reflect what is missing.
In the first micro scene of this letter, a young woman came up to the bonfire with a clay bowl, held it over the smoke so the inside would warm and then offered it to the old man leading the rite; the old man took it as if drinking an absence, handed it back empty and laughed but not with joy, rather like a mechanism, a spring that snaps when fear runs out of speech. In the second micro scene, a boy slipped out of the circle and ran toward the furrows, I followed without anyone noticing, I found him kneeling beside barbed wire, touching with his fingertip a drop of frost, as if it were a domesticated star; when he saw me he did not cry, he only said the drop was as big as the world, and I understood he was repeating a vision that was not his, that language inhabits us.
To walk above it, you will come to know that cold to the left of fantasy… that crystalline frost that sows drops as big as the world and leaves tracks on the road of time like lost cups; I tell you because perhaps you do not have time, or you have it in another way, and even so this mark we leave without meaning to may interest you, the footprint that seems like nothing and ends up an archive, because here time does not move forward, it piles up, it turns into a scab on the walls, it gets under the nails, and when one thinks one is living the present one is really touching layers, sediments of gestures that repeat.
I think about technology, about the antennas shining on the hill like needles of a new saint, about the phones that light faces during the rite and steal the darkness to turn it into experience, about the way a screen promises company and delivers a reflection, and I feel that poison is always in the tail of what we desire, always at the end as structure, as a law of balance, and my eyes pierce the cold darkness parallel to my isolated land with no firewood for my flame. It is a physical need, the fire eats what is its own and asks for more, and I have nothing but words to feed it while fate arrives and speaks with rancid words… this amuses it, I have seen it in faces when they think they choose and they are already chosen, in the way love returns to the same wound even if it changes its name, in the fatigue of bodies that work the earth and still dream of leaving, in my own nostalgia, which is not a return but an exile. That is why I beg you for something I do not know how to phrase without betraying myself, that if one day you receive this letter or hear of it as a murmur in your instruments or as a vibration in your bones, do not think it is only folklore from a lesser species, but the clumsy attempt to open a narrow crack in the universe so a little water can enter, so the dew will not be only of crosses and roses but also of names that can still be saved from repetition.
Self reproach, an impossible addressee, anaphoras, supplication and exposure to the elements. When the last bonfire shrinks to a simple islet of embers, the whole field seems larger yet also lonelier, and the mountain becomes again that motionless skeleton where we seek rest and find only questions; I remain with the written page and its edge damp with my breath, I draw it close to the heat and the paper bends as if it wanted to flee, and in that bend I think I see an orbit, a sign that might be legible to you. I do not ask you to understand us, no, only to look with patience at this insistent frost, this cold that stays to the left of fantasy yet is real, and to remember that every species, however ancient it believes itself to be, trembles when it names its destiny, because it knows the poison can also be evocation, and that memory is sometimes the only thing that burns when there is no firewood left. In cauda semper stat venenum. The poison is always at the end.
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