L'Atlas de Pays Disparus

()

Maps make clear like nothing else

the unbridgeable gap

between representation and reality.

()

But a child may pore over old atlases

without having eaten yet this fruit of knowledge.

()

Russia is a sprawl of cantaloupe

and Europe a rumpled quilt

leaned over diligently by War, that blind seamstress...

()

She mutters as she works

'Baikal, sevastopol

manchuria, tannu touva

samarkand, byzantium

kashmir, zanzibar, serendib..'

(Philately)

As a child, I never collected stamps

but I mourn with nostalgia the lost opportunity.

A stamp is a taste of infinitely vivid unreality

in the hinterland between representation and actuality:

dirigibles above the Mongolian steppe, mandalas, Cernunnos, birds

of paradise –

()

A stamp is a poem, a metaphor

an envoy from foreignness, a migratory bird

skimming on strange motionless wings over whole continents.

()

The stamps of vanished countries are

emissaries of the infinite. The atlas of the infinite is this:

synaesthesia of shapes unknown to geometry, alphabet of

borderlines and the colours of citrus fruits...

()

The alphabet of the infinite is this: terrain

without eye. Walking towards the centre of a continent

and meeting there people who chatter like birds, speech

without phoneme, without tongue...

()

This is the history book of the infinite:

this is infinite remembering

translateable to infinite forgetting

for its pages are so very heavy, no one dares lift them

and the letters like a million ants go marching endlessly

but never reaching

oblivion.

()

This is the borderline of the infinite:

like a suture contiguous to itself, extremity

overlapped with extremity.

()

What vanishes from the atlas of the finite

arrives spontaneously in the atlas of the infinite.

What is banished from the land of consciousness

sprouts mushroomlike on the terrain of dreams.

()

The compass roses in these twin atlases

are images ping-ponged between two mirrors.

()

My love, our veins are tributaries scribbled

spiderishly across the map of somethingness.

Thus, I tremble to think of the ineluctable

day when we will reach that

half-effaced border with

nothingness –

()

This border is an asymptote.

If you like, you may call it the horizon.

You cannot reach it just by walking towards it.

You must turn the page inside out

and disappear.

(Nova Zembla)

So do not fear, my love

the borderline – we will find ourselves

on the frontier of Tannu Touva.

A zeppelin and crescent moon hang in the sky

with all the positive absence

of the un-existant.