I carry Tarkovsky’s ear in my pocket,
still listening to the rain of Stalker,
while the rest of his body evaporates in memory
like a priest who lost his faith but not his habit.
I carry Wong Kar-wai’s eyelids in my chest,
always late, always oblique, always chewing time
like someone chewing electric hydrangeas.
And in my stomach, I keep Lynch’s tongue, rolled up,
viscous, repeating
that reality is just a badly filmed traffic accident.
But I’m also weighed down by the armpit of certain films
I wanted to forget, that morally dubious,
sweaty armpit that insists
on reappearing when I close my eyes
as if the armpit were the whole film,
and the whole film was the armpit.
And there’s also the knee of a cheap melodrama,
creaking like the door of an abandoned church,
reminding me that not every sin deserves aesthetic penance.
I carry with me the collarbone of Bergman’s Persona,
which breaks whenever I try to tell the truth.
And the phalanx of Last Year at Marienbad,
which points nowhere, a lost Blade Runner,
but with such useless elegance that it almost moves me.
And the tibia of Holy Motors, which dances alone,
even when the rest of the skeleton has already resigned.
The bizarre words come in shoals:
treacherous, lugubrious, sordid,
revelry, torrid, achromatic, journey,
cosmic, pandas, languid, Pyrrhic, sibilant.
All of them want to be a whole body,
but I only give them a fingernail,
an eyelash, a piece of cartilage.
And in the end, a commandment remains:
Love, love and death to everything
that does not come from love
and I raise the scapula of cinema,
the rib of language, the fibula of memory,
and let everything bow before this sentence.
