At the beginning was thirst,

            desire & the double

                        vision that what you

want to drink wants

to drink you too.

                                     Two

movements need a holed

wall, a walled hole,

learn it from breath, double

            systole/diastole into

the lungs & through wall-

holes, through the liquid &

out again,

            breathday she accurately

called it, when you take

you first, or the first is

given, takes you

            slap on rear? wall

opens —

                         she visualized nape-

            hold,

(all poetry a rendition of

          first breath & the pleasure

& pain of continuation —

             the metazoan, life animated,

a matter of liquid contained,

    liquid in walls, cell

           is self, cell is

because holes in

            wall, breathe the outside

                 world in, self is

             holed cell, is holy play

                         of liquid / solid —

nothing is all liquid

nothing is all solid

nothing is not is nothing

           we are liq-sol

                        uid-lid

….

in-between is the hyphen links &

  separates liquid from solid

           outside from inside

if breath is silent

how is sound born?

Pierre Joris has published over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Todesfuge/Deathfugue Pierre Joris & Paul Celan (Small Orange Import, 2024), Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021) & Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, (Contra Mundum Press 2023 & 2022). In 2020 two Paul Celan translations came out: Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG) & Microliths They are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose (CMP). Forthcoming are Poasis II (Selected Poems 2000-2024), Wesleyan University Press, 2025, & Diwans of Exile: A Pierre Joris Reader, edited by Pierre Joris  & Ariel Resnikoff (CMP 2026).