For Anne, Who Makes Collages,
For Me, Who Looks at Them

We arrive when lunch is already over,
among the chairs left out of place and the apple peels.
Now we must imagine
the table inhabited by life, the sound of all the voices together,
the color of the wine against the clean tablecloth,
the taste of bread.

There was, before us, a present time
which we listen to the way the living listen before they die,
in an extreme effort to join life to life:
sometimes, in an anonymous moment,
that time reaches us from afar,
places truth inside our own time and sets it ablaze,
as when at six every morning we awaken
before the day is laid down before us.

Perhaps our truest art
is only the mercy of thought
toward all matter,
which rests content within itself,
inside a form.

So you arrange your clippings
and forge another original world,
as original as the first:
a newborn time with its clear skies
or boats disfigured by winters;
an ordinary space in which to wander,
where everything belongs to something else,
yet can awaken complete admiration.

I sit beside you, without words.
We fix our gaze on the center of our life,
which rises beneath the sun,
and in itself that gaze is almost a murmur,
like a chorus in two voices:

one is reality, passing into the wind,
and the other sings amid its noise.

— Silvia Bre