Solitude
Insomnia
Shadows
Desire
Emptiness
Melancholy
Sad rain
Withered lilacs
Inconsolable yearning
The eternal night
Its roaring silence
Writing the darkness
Despairing the inadequacy of words
Searching for a new language
To describe the inaccessible garden
Pale exiled queen alone in your cold castle
The road to the garden another pitiless path
Going nowhere if not down into the depths 1
Consoled by the belief that the only possibility of redemption lies in Poetry
Dreaming of beauty in the garden while despairing of finding the right words
Seeing the garden in your mind's eye yet unable to touch its existence 2
Watched over by the empty, white moon, seeking a truce with the shadows while singing melancholy fugues into the black night
Infusing the poems with your breath insofar as every letter of every word having been sacrificed in the ceremonies of living 3
Could you have imagined that your fervid incantations would be haunting our rooms, your words hanging in the air at midnight?
Notes: *Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) was an Argentine poet. She ended her life on September 25, 1972. New Directions released
Extracting the Stone of Madness (Collected Poems 1962-1972) in 2016, which has been my inspiration.
1. "Going nowhere if not down into the depths" are among the last words Alejandra Pizarnik wrote.
They were found on the blackboard in her room.
2. This is a slightly modified phrase from László Krasznahorkai's A Mountain to the North, a River to the South, Paths to the West,
a Road to the East, New Directions, 2022. (This novella is about the search for a garden.)
3. This is taken from the prose writing of Alejandra Pizarnik (changing the word "my" to "your") appearing in A Tradition of Rupture,
Ugly Duckling Press, 2019
