VISIT NO. 12 618 Poem by Maarten Inghels

To make it go more quiet in the room than in her blood:
hammer the beating beetle from the whitened walls,

nudge the receding curtains back to sleep,
the coffee slowly runs to a dead end. Quietude

outlines itself across the wall in darkened shapes,
first camels, weasels, a sluggish whale, then

we become hares in tall grass. We play dirty
beasts. And there in the room her brain assumes

a voice the way her blood speaks: from the stem
her love disseminates itself. Trampling on the spot,

because I am a dead blackfish, shoulders shaking
and trembling I lie on the bed. My hands are folded

in straits. Because what blindly knows its way through me,
one's own rigorous love as retort, scares me the most.