The Music itself

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The Music itself

To play the body as you play a perfect instrument,

Every organ produces a new melody, a new variation,

To wield perfect mastery over the rhythm of cells.

The cells trained to perfection

To sense the shining sting of the genius infiltrating your biological course,

To cut through the body like an icebreaker,

through the ocean

To master the complexity

To overcome the ethical abyss

To never get stuck in the shallow waters of pettiness

To not survive the wreck of unbearable exigency

Yet to not humble yourself, to not haul in sail and leave the stock rust in the shallow waters  

To be your body

Stasis without metastasis

To not allow death catch up with you in malice

To be right and to look the worthy life into the eye

Like in the morning when you look at yourself in the mirror

To gaze not at death but at the serene life in dignity

To be exactly this death of yours and this life of yours

Measured as a perfect mechanism

Like the perfect mechanism of the unfathomable

The disorganised choreography of the starlings murmuration in the springtime

The splashes of the sea the waves of the storm

To collect every memory so as to see it in the eyes of worthy life 

To shelter it in the wilderness

To not rescue it or give it promises

But to stop it, to humble it, to nourish it

The images are the fragments of the body

Of our body remain only fragments

The hedgehogs of the images

Yet hedgehogs that

collect the forest mushrooms with dignity

at dawn

at dusk

 

*

No scale playing no register studying

But the music itself, outright, all at once

The music itself.

 

 
Excerpt from the philosophical poem The Virtuoso of Life (2011-2012)
Translated from the Bulgarian by Filip Stoilov