For how could anything white be distinct

from or divided from whiteness?

Meister Eckhart

Because I am the bullet

That has gone through everyone already,

I thought of you long before you thought of me.

Each one of you still keeps a blood-stained handkerchief

In which to swaddle me, but it stays empty

And even the wind won’t remain in it long.

Cleverly you’ve invented name after name for me,

Mixed the riddles, garbled the proverbs,

Shook you loaded dice in a tin cup,

But I do not answer back even to your curses,

For I am nearer to you than your breath.

One sun shines on us both through a crack in the roof.

A spoon brings me through the window at dawn.

A plate shows me off to the four walls

While with my tail I swing at the flies.

But there’s no tail and the flies are your thoughts.

Steadily, patiently I life your arms.

I arrange them in the posture of someone drowning,

And yet the sea in which you are sinking,

And even this night above it, is myself.

Because I am the bullet

That has baptized each one of your senses,

Poems are made of our lusty wedding nights …

The joy of words as they are written.

The ear that got up at four in the morning

To hear the grass grow inside a word.

Still, the most beautiful riddle has no answer.

I am the emptiness that tucks you in like a mockingbird’s nest,

The fingernail that scratched on your sleep’s blackboard.

Take a letter: From cloud to onion.

Say: There was never any real choice.

One gaunt shadowy mother wiped our asses,

The same old orphanage taught us loneliness.

Street-organ full of blue notes,

I am the monkey dancing to your grinding—

And still you are afraid-and so,

It’s as if we had not budged from the beginning.

Time slopes. We are falling head over heels

At the speed of night. That milk tooth

You left under the pillow, it’s grinning.