Contradictions

by Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua)
translated by Alba Stacey Hawkins

Outside,
night lurks,
like a tiger crouching
to leap through the window.
In this room where
hard at work
I pull words from the air,
I am amazed by the sudden desire
for a soft
kiss
on my leg.

There is no one here.
My body is here alone
while I am with them
silent witnesses
women my fingers know
as they enter at night
with the breath of the moon.

Women of the ages
inhabit me:
Isadora dancing in her tunic.
Virginia Woolf in a room of her own.
Sappho leaping from the rock.
Medea. Phaedra. Jane Eyre
and my friends,
refusing to fade over time,
writing themselves
coming out of the shadows showing their profiles
finally seeing themselves
free of all constraint.

Women dance in the lamplight.
They climb onto tables. They give incendiary speeches.
They besiege me with suffering. Marks on their bodies.
Childbirth.
Silence of warm kitchens.
Ephemeral, tense bedrooms.

Towering women.
Monumental women surround me.
They recite their poems. They sing. They dance.
They reclaim their voice.
They say: “I could never study Latin. I could never write like
Shakespeare.
No one supported my love of music.”
George Sand: “I had to disguise myself as a man.
I wrote hidden in a male name.”
And before that, Jane Austen
composing the words to “Pride and Prejudice”
in a notebook, in the church’s vestibule,
repeatedly interrupted by visitors.

Women of the ages,
solemn
mature
gentle
whose shimmering eyes
envelop me
mortal immortals
in their unearthly bodies,
they seem to take pleasure
observing this room of my own,
the unused ream of white pages,
the modern word processor,
bookcases,
dictionaries.

I glance over at the linen closet,
my silky lingerie on the dresser.
I notice the shopping list on the nightstand.

I still feel the desire
for a soft
kiss
on my leg.