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This spectral texture of darkness, this melody in my bones, this breath from various silences, this going deeper and deeper, this dark, dark gallery, this sinking without sinking.

Vacío gris es mi nombre, mi pronombre.

Conozco la gama de los miedos y ese comenzar a cantar despacito en el desfiladero que reconduce hacia mi desconocida que soy, mi emigrante de sí.

Escribo contra el miedo. Contra el viento con garras que se aloja en mi respiración.

Y cuando por la mañana temes encontrarte muerta (y que no haya más imágenes): el silencio de la compresión, el silencio del mero estar, en esto se van los años, en estos se fue la bella alegría animal.

Where fear neither speaks in stories or poems, nor gives shape to terrors or triumphs.

My name, my pronoun – a grey void.

I'm familiar with the full range of fear. I know what it's like to start singing and to set off slowly through the narrow mountain pass that leads back to the stranger in me, to my own emigrant.

I write to ward off fear and the clawing wind that lodges in my throat.

And in the morning, when you are afraid of finding yourself dead (of there being no more images): the silence of compression, the silence of existence itself. This is how the years fly by. This is how we lost that beautiful animal happiness.

Dazzle of the new day, the yellow birds in the morning. A hand releases the dark; another drags the hair of a drowned woman who is crossing endlessly through the mirror. To return to the body’s memory is to return to my mourning bones, and to grasp what it is my voice says.

And it’s true that I’ve woken up in the place of love, because I heard its song with a smile of pain and told myself: this is the place of love (if trembling, if phosphorescent).

She sang in a fog that the sun could barely shine through, on the morning of my birth – and I would wander the with a torch in my hand across all the deserts of the world, even after death, to search for you, my dear lost love – and the song of death unfolded in the course of a single morning, and she sang and sang.

Before it was a light in my language born steps away from love. Night open. Night presence.

Naked and dreaming of a solar night. I've lain through animal days. The wind and the rain erased me as they might a fire, or a poem written on a wall.

Although the voice (its oblivion tossing back my shipwrecked selves) presides over a frozen garden I recall with all my lives my reasons for forgetting.

Tomorrow they'll dress me in ash for the sunrise, they'll fill my mouth with flowers. I'll learn to sleep inside the memory of a wall, on the breath of a dreaming animal.

In the stiff hand of a dead man, in the memory of a madman, in the sadness of a child, in the unreachable glass, in the endless thirst.

Toda la noche hago la noche. Toda la noche escribo. Palabra por palabra yo escribo la noche.

The absent figures are sighing, and the night is thick. The night is the color of the eyelids of the dead.

All night long I make the night. All night long I write. Word by word I am writing the night.

Boats in native waters. Black water, creature of oblivion. Lilac water, the only vigil. A mystery burnished by voices in the park. How ancient this is.

But you I want to look at until your face fades from my fear, like a bird stepping away from the sharp edges of night.

All these gestures by my body and my voice just to turn me into the offering. The flowers the wind has left behind in the door.

Cover the memory of your face with the mask of who you’ll become, and frighten the girl you used to be.

The pleasure of losing yourself in the image foreseen. I rose from my body and went out in search of who I am. A pilgrim of myself, I have gone to the one who sleeps in the winds of her country.

But don’t speak of gardens. Don’t speak of the moon. Don’t speak of roses or of the sea. Speak of what you know. Speak of the thing that rings in the marrow, that plays in your eyes with shadow and light. Speak of the endless ache in your bones. Speak of vertigo. Speak of respiration and of desolation and of your treason. It’s so dark, so silent, this process that grips me. Just speak of the silence.