Between her horns it held a heavy piece of the sky
like a crown. A little later it lowered her head and
drank some water from the creek licking, with her
bloodied tongue, the other cool tongue of her
watery idol, as if licking her internal maternally,
serenely, irreversibly, widely her internal wound
from the outside, as if licking the silent, great, round
wound of the world — perhaps it even quenched its
thirst — perhaps our blood is the only thing that
quenches our thirst — who knows.
Soon after she raised her head over the water, not
touching anything, untouched too and serene like
a saint, and only a small lake made of the blood
of her lips remained between her feet that were
rooted in the river, a small red lake, in the shape
of a map that slowly enlarged and vanished, melted
as if its painless, freed blood traveled far away to
an invisible vein of the cosmos; and for that reason
she was calm, as if she had learned that our blood
doesn’t vanish, that nothing vanishes, nothing,
in this great nothing, the inconsolable, cruel,
incomparable, so sweet, so consolable, so nothing.
Manolis Aligizakis 