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everything born of a corrupt, noxious gestation of larvae. And my hunger feeds on those putrid, decomposing creatures. My rite purifies my strength. But malignancy lurks in the jungle. I take a draught of blood that satiates me. I hear cymbals and trumpets and drums that fill the air with noises and tumult, muffling then the silence of the sun disc and its prodigy. I want a cloak woven with threads of solar gold. The sun is the magical tension of silence. In my trek to the mysteries I hear the carnivorous plant that laments times immemorial: and I have obscene nightmares buffeted by sickly winds. I am enchanted, seduced, tossed by furtive voices. The almost unintelligible cuneiform inscriptions speak of how to conceive and give formulas for feeding on the strength of the darkness. They speak of naked and groveling females. And the eclipse of the sun causes secret terror that nonetheless proclaims a splendor of the heart. I place the bronze diadem over my hair.
    Behind the thought—back even further—is the ceiling I looked at as an infant. Suddenly, I was crying. It was already love. Or maybe I wasn't crying. I was keeping watch. Scrutinizing the ceiling. The instant is the vast egg of warm viscera.
    Now it's dawn again.
    But at sunrise I think we're contemporaries of the next day. God help me: I'm lost. I need you terribly. We have to be two. So that the wheat can be tall, I'm so solemn that I'm going to stop.
    I was born a few moments ago and I'm dazed.
    The crystals tinkle and sparkle. The wheat is ripe: the bread is broken. But broken softly? It's important to know. I don't think, just as the diamond doesn't think. I shine, totally clear. I'm neither hungry nor thirsty: I am. I have two eyes that are open. Open to the void. To the ceiling.
    I'm going to make an adagio. Read slowly and peacefully. It's a large fresco.
    To be born is like this:
    The sunflowers slowly turn their corollas to the sun. The wheat is ripe. The bread has a softness that devours itself. My impulse merges with that of the roots of the trees.
    Birth: the poor have a prayer in Sanskrit. They do not ask: they are poor in spirit. Birth . . . the Africans have a skin that's black and opaque. Many are the children of the Queen of Sheba with King Solomon. To lull me, recently born, to sleep, the Africans intone a simple chant, monotonously singing about a mother-in-law who, as soon as they leave, comes and steals a bunch of bananas.
    There is a love song of theirs that tells, also monotonously, the lament that I make my own: why do I love you if you don't requite? I send messengers in vain; when I compliment you, you hide your face; why do I love you if you don't even notice me? There is also the lullaby for elephants on their way to bathe in the river. I am African: a sad and long and savage fibre of lament is in this voice of mine that sings to you. The whites used to beat the blacks with whips. But just as the swan secretes an oil that waterproofs its skin, so the blacks' pain cannot penetrate and hurt. It's possible to transform pain into pleasure—one "click" is enough. A black swan?
    But there are those who are dying of hunger and all I can do is be born. My long, monotonous narrative is: what can I do for them? My answer is: paint a fresco in adagio. I could suffer the hunger of others in silence, but a contralto voice makes me sing—a dusky, black song. It's just my message as a person. A person eats another from hunger. But I have fed on my own placenta. And I'll not bite my nails because this is a peaceful adagio.
    I stopped to drink a glass of cool water: the glass in this now-instant is of thick, faceted crystal with thousands of sparkles of instants. Are objects time stopped?
    The moon is still full. Clocks have stopped and a hoarse chime slides down the wall. I want to be buried with a watch on my wrist so that something can pulsate time under the earth.
    I'm so vast. I'm coherent: my canticle is profound. Slow. But growing. It's growing