I am the muffled push. The living anomaly in a dead cosmos, the thickness that takes back space the moment the noise stops. I am the night wind that sands the schist, the blind sap that fractures the rock, the blood that beats beneath the fur. No centre, no face: only the hunger, the claw, the thorn, the flesh that bites the world. A wall, a dead sheet of iron: one more hardness to break. The hand that raises them has my blood: it believes itself of another world. I swallow the ruins out of a fury without a name. Whether I am pushed back into the dark or left the noonday sky, I give up nothing of my density. I am not what survives at the margins. I am the miracle armed with teeth that forces its way through.
I am what hangs by almost nothing. The skin that drinks the rain, and the poison with it. The dust of a wing, left on the fingers that brushed it. The slowed heart beneath the vault, which a single light awakens and which burns in one hour the store of a whole winter. I am what comes undone at a single degree, what a veil of silt smothers, what takes a century to cover the palm of a stone. The glow that goes out when the night is no longer dark enough. No claw, no hunger: a membrane, a waiting. I force nothing. I hang by a water that has stayed cold, by a silence no one has broken. I am the unarmed miracle, which lasts only because no one has touched it yet.
The same fever beneath fur and beneath bark, in the mud and in flight. I split the strata, I fall asleep in them, I go out in them, and I return through a thousand mouths where a single one fell silent. All around, the vast cold begets nothing. And in the middle of this cold, I beat.