Archipelago

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from
NIGHT JOURNEY

MARIA NEGRONI
tr. ANNE TWITTY

The Great Watcher

I was weaving a tapestry containing the maze of this city and the palace, and I sent a swift-footed ragazzo to lose himself in it until he found you. I understood that the tapestry would bring me another lover. It doesn't matter, that is how it always happens: truth begins or ends by evaporating. I will await you in a circular room, constellated with birds, on the threshold of that door full of night and world, which opens onto the unalterable. Like dedicating an unfinished poem to a little girl, giving it to her to warp when suffering no longer seems a more authentic, spacious world. I will elongate the road to the unsayable. I will be the act of weaving. You, the leopard of multiple horns that has just now appeared on the green brocade and is observing it all like a herald, enigmatically.

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©1994, Maria Negroni. Translation ©1997, Anne Twitty.

ARCHIPELAGO Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1997

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