THE O, by Paloma Yannakakis

By Paloma Yannakakis

In the name of no one’s name—a flight, a whim, a deep-sprung
desire, I manifest the right to manifest, to make present through uncertain
roads and falling trees, in a day when Arnold Schwarzenneger is the governor of California, when—but we are not here to add anger to the already burning
world—we must bring the future here, bring ourselves to the future undaunted by the already-done—

Odysseas Elytis wrote, “So much the night, so much the howl in the wind / so much the dew in the air, so much for silence / Around us the despotic sea… / / the untried and the from elsewhere brought / Are intolerable and it’s early, do you hear me, It is early still in this world…To speak about you and about me / / / /
The enormous lianas and the volcanoes’ lavas / One day, do you hear me / will bury us and the thousand later years, do you hear / luminous will make of us strata, do you hear me / On which the heartlessness of, do you hear me / people will shine.”*

Would we know how to live in a just world? What would the sky look like?
The flowers of a spectacular brilliance, their color pure, fluid as water.
What would we search for, among the rocks, the unfound a piece of glass lying shattered invisible on the road until it’s found… Each voice to manifest
what before lost its way without a voice to speak it, And now
will you listen? Have you heard?

Our hands will make so much. The impossible shines through the possible, we throw a stone closer to the possible, our words throw open the path to what hasn’t
yet been…Do you hear me? Do you hear it? O—

*from “The Monogram”