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my house’s stairway is seized

with vertigo.

Matter having forsaken its laws,

we land in hell,

ascending to heaven.

*

Shadows move along ladders

under the silence of ordinary things

there is another silence:

it belongs neither to the leaves nor to the

dead

with a crown of birds circling                           
him    
a child is running in an abandoned                 
house                                                
the stairway takes the measure of                  
its own emptiness                                        

I myself am the stairway that

Time has used in its

funeral course

The Manifestations of the Voyage

Etel Adnan

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