Five Poems

(Translated by Tess Rankin)

In the lost margins of a map, Phantom Limb is a spot between silence and the place where the undertow of a dangerous music takes us.

There, recompense clings to the body's history like two emptinesses that, locking eyes, trip and fall.

There, no one forgets the lesson: that the navel is the scar traced by the flight of two identical birds on the belly of the world.

Phantom Limb is comparable to a pupil that dilates around a Japanese wave sketched on the open seas, which, barely visible, seeps through the porthole of a pirate ship called Phantom Limb.

There, not everything is said, not everything is written.

There, one waits.

If the ghosts come back, we try to care for them. We watch them breathe quietly alongside the shifting light. They are the subtitles that no one reads in a movie theater full of sleeping people.

There, one waits, or hopes that the wave ages faster than the eye.