Version by Olimpia Iacob
Translations Consultant: Stanley H. Barkan
Poet/Publisher, Cross-Cultural Communications
CARESS
Your name gives me pain
like the branches of the trees
out of which winter has sucked
its frozen milk.
The beauty of the water gives me pain
when it springs from the rocks
like the thought of someone much beloved
and lost.
The only caressing fact
is the bursting of this spring
over the shoulders of the things,
as if a big love
came out
as a remaking of the world.
SOMEWHERE
Somewhere, where wonders are required,
the Saviour’s deed falls like a guillotine
and aTartar barks like a hungry dogľ
there the genii of death,
there cries of sparrows near quiet lilies.
Like a shield, like a disaster,
the people’s heads, over the trees,
reveal their orbits.
Who has spoken of this explosive universe,
who has taught us to scatter in the universe with the light speed,
you, transient shadow. The flake, the sliver, the ashes,
are the bed of chance.
And how worthy is the flesh that sings,
this fragile mixture
of stars and destiny, of kings and spirits,
with slow steps walking over the graves…
FROM THE NORTH
From the north winds come to knock us down
from the south hardly any wind comes.
Your thin and tender finger
breaks my temple with a gentle touch.
It’s been long since I wrote not even a line about you.
Maybe you are dead and I do not even know it,
or maybe you are alive for yet a short time
to see but for a moment my nightmare in black letters.
Or maybeľwho knowsľyou are again
a flame abruptly springing from the stars,
breaking this crust that looks like an egg’s
of the world that spreads out in space
hard silences yearning as if from the tomb
after a new existence, behind the lattice.
Loneliness
With all our feelings on alert
we keep an eye on loneliness
Like a bird of prey
it circles above us
If it claws someone
not even a whimper can be heard
Only the bald croaking
of desolation.
I Am All Alone Now
I am all alone now like an angel banished into the darkness
my winged voice grows more and more demonic.
The tear of the rain mingles with the track of wind on the cheek
The sycamores bend down towards me out of the dream of terror
fluttering their fruit like some bombs from which
the illusion disintegrates,
and the world moves, shakes out of its own frame
like the painting on an aging canvas, turning yellow.
TWILIGHT
Before this quiet universe,
I stretched out my arms as if crucified
expecting the stars, the supernovas
to remind me of something
Before the boundlessness imbued with scent
of God’s gardens,
I wanted to cleanse my soul of too many sins
that keep torturing me ever more day by day.
Facing the twilight, facing the untouched light,
I claim own unsatisfied individuality,
like a helmet in the mountains I feel like kneeling
to convince myself I’ve had enough of the world’s madness.
Blue drops of dew fall down upon my cheek bones
as if I drained the wild beast of the Apocalypse out of the alien blood
that milked me the night of my coming into the world
for this end, for this beginning.
NOTES
Many lights, many fires
flash through my flesh,
flash through my eyes like some games
to upend my poise.
The tears I keep shedding torment me,
the sighs unsighed sooth me.
You watch it all,
As I listen to your whisper.
UTOPIA
Thousands and thousands of times,
wishing to repair here and there
the damaged machinery of the world,
I have got the cheese.
I have melted the metal of trust
in acquaintances, friends, in love,
to contribute something
to the remaking of human relationships.
And all that, of course,
with utmost candour
but failing
alas, failing.
Now I try to recover my fuel,
I try to buy your conscience
with witty phrases.
Let us be together again
to look at the world
the same way,
patterned by angels.
JEREMIAD
O, God, God, what I have written and what I have sung,
what thoughts, what winds have shaken me,
what flowers I have wasted, what life I have lost,
only for a mean return to clay.
O God, the winter comes, death’s buzz
too like the wasps’
or the bees’, the cross bends
in the cemetery over what once was.
I groan my groan and loneliness,
I throw away seaweeds like the sea,
I roar double tides at the moon.
I was born, I will die. What was I ?
I Go Off
I go off, I go off, she says to me
and never will I stand
on your right side
Stay a little more, stay a little more, I say to her
for you are my shining god
and the ore heavy with feeling
But she goes off and goes off
and no one knows if she will ever comes back, sweet,
my soul to seize by its handle
The Thirst For History
Life trembles with the thirst for history. Its blinkers of blind horse shake with the thirst for light. Wishes alone pierce the pores of this animal. Thirst. And the fear that some day the planet will break in the arms of the void. Taking the same thirst as principle.
The life of the world. The feeling of the world for representing life. And it, a modest rag hardly blown by the solar wind. Through the waned paleness of initiation there pass the little horses whose libido has risen like a flame. Small stallions flinging their hooves, tiny mares terrorized by instinct.
The bucket of dirt overflows. The ruler finally sets foot in the conquered country. The one that has conquered itself for him. The one that, feeling the need for being whipped, knelt down under the whip. The woman’s flesh trembles with thirst. The executioner has come and reads cheap things about sexual pathology from a book worn out along with time.
And we? With white flashes of lightning in the corners, at several dark tables, in a café. Records and recording tapes. Huge screens. Music that has been covered with dust. Money, money, money. Women that climb up and down the ladder of desire. Money and women. Money and men. Swollen phalluses and thrilling vaginas. Money takes that fusiform-like shape and drowns into the woman’s body. The woman jerkily laughs, her eyes sparkle. She has four layers of dead skin upon her face, glittering in the red beam. It is now that the man climbs down from the caves, comes back to the caves, gasps, intersects the trolling that wants to suggest music.
And we? We leave the same tables; we have had the same cups of coffee; we have smoked the same cigarettes; we have gossiped about the same politicians; women younger or older looking at us; thirst drunk in from the cognac glasses; watery belching thrown into the face of the neighbours, into the ears of the discussion partners, crescendo¾descrescendo; suddenly the intoxicated young man urinates vehemently upon the table, the drops reflecting the lights of the rainbow.
We? Full of importance, with the destiny of this world caught between our jaws as the iron bars used for horses. Small love. Failed sometimes. On the boulevards, in the crowd, the putred galoshes rustle burying the feet into a sleepy asphalt. The sun grows bigger, swells. It blows out in the sky and covers the parks with bluish sour cream that lightens smouldering.
Cotton-wool is a bargain for those who die. It is laid in the coffin, it protects from jolts. It can be replaced with tow. Water will do, too. You lay the dead man into the coffin, so he may float. You press well his face into the slops and leave the lid down. And suddenly you realize you are inside. You discover the constellations. The Swan. The dead man comes to stink. He starts a quick conversation for you. You kiss him, you puke over his eyes. And you have shut a book.
Just we? All our lakes, all our mountains, the wonderful plains, the seas of the earth. We have comfort from everywhere. We run playing the child. We look for one another. We smile at one another with a gentle dissimulation knowing that the smile, which is ours, cannot be given as a gift. But even the trees, the stones and the clouds seem to have a slight perfidious smile. The lot of the world is drawn ..A little shirt.
He who wears it is the executioner. Hardly a child. With a little twig in his hand, he lashes the venerable white beards covering them with blood. He has a crystal-like laugh. And manly. Youthful. Murderous. It draws the maidens.It draws the virginal souls. The adulation of the poets. The epic spirit. The dramas creak on the theatre scenes. Champagne bursts out. Victorious cries.
And we? In the swarming of the world, with the dehydrated skulls of the dead in our hands, syllabizing Divina Commedia. We understand absolutely nothing. The third part, especially, seems to be absolutely abscure.
By the gates¾here are the gates¾ are the angels, as it has already been said, with their spears aflame. We murmur the sad password into their ears. They pretend not to hear. They pretend to ignore us. Other angels, veiled, push us onto the gold steps. We climb up breathing with difficulty. High up many angels, bright as the suns keep on looking forward. All of them are in ecstasy. Their look, like intoxication. There. And we? The place is vacant. Dark. The angels’ ecstasy is darkness. Our eyes are not even in tears.
The Gold Animal
The gold animal has flung its harness into the clouds. Its hooves slowly walk on the backbone of the earth. The peals of laughter draw the trees upwards, move the leaves. In the woods one can hear neither the gnashing of the knife, nor the murmur of the blood that stops flowing from it. The throat has remained open. The red mouth of the wound draws the insects of the autumn. The child dreams of walking on, holding the woman’s hand, the woman being his mother. But she has wiped out the knife,has carefully put it in its place, in the handbag, between the mirror and her lipstick. What is really rouge is still there, shining, being the concern of the police. And the sun looks into the woman’s eyes, quietly crosses the optical nerve and places the pale radiation in the brain, where the bored angel eats his can of beans and pork¾cold, clotted.
The animal driving waits impatiently. She finally arrives. Her foot in her shoe now full of mud is a trill, a little bird, a young being. The car comes to be full of some smell of sweat and perfume¾ it comes to be full of misty air. The door is not closed, yet, from the dark woods bats come out, persistent, vehement ashes come down on her forehead and especially on her hair. The car starts, goes in careful zigzag among the puddles where the headlights begin shining as if blood. Mother wipes away a tear of sweat on the temple, another one on the wind screen vibraing in a manly strain. The evening closes in.
The poppies dropped their petals a few months ago. The city is so far away, and the villages here and there seem to touch each other, invasions of memories, of local mermaids with hips of thick felt. The young people are happy when they walk to and fro, from one village to another, from one country to another. Love loves alienation, the crops are, therefore, rich and vigorous. Before the windows of the sky are violet butterflies, violet stars. The swinging moon leaves the earth thrown down on one side, a cow knelt down. The manure scattered on the field gives out some violent smell, diminished by the mute immense space, sending out ghosts from the beginning of creation. The look passes through the solemn void.
One says that children come from the crossbreeding of at least three elements. Except for the two quite well known, there is also a ghost of ether involved. The seed is but the building where someone coming from afar settles down. It inhabits an egg, breaks its crust and puts out in the world its arms and legs of the egg into which it shifts. If you look deeply into its eyes, you can be swallowed. But all is but a story. The knife breaks for good the crust of life and the ghost becomes a ghost again, achieved by the marks of dirt.
The gold animal has thrown away its harness and rides on the back of the twilight. The poppies burn in mid-winter and warm our old souls. He who has no old people may buy them. He who has no brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers, uncles, aunts…All can be found. Lay figures can be adopted. Crucified christs with no eyes, with snivels of blood that adorn their upper lip. The upper part of the world, the public ideas¾toilets of immaculation. The havoc which the dreamers of a century play in the following century.
Earthquakes
For Ioan Bran
How many earthquakes does the humankind still need to know, wonders he who is bed-ridden, a horizontal cross, with his forehead in flight. He felt the obscure spur of the orchard, the cherry trees in bloom shaking¾ not, yet, because of the earthquake.
The planet stood still, its rough soil had not shaken for very many years. Instead, the trees had undulating trunks, the branches scratched the clear blue. The nights fell down like some balloons that broke at dawn leaving their purple marks in the trees. And he lay down his soul broken at first giving up the sight¾his sight had remained untouched¾refusing the colours, the sounds of a world that had crushed him through an oversight.
Death called on him every night and his steps brought along some thrill in the walls of the house, then some sort of cry in his flesh. The cry of flesh started, like the flame of a match, from its rubbing against the edge of the box where darkness was. The hysterical cry of flesh coiled on the boulders which he carried in his arms or on his back. Or treading over them. It has always been difficult to be stated how he approaches, in what position and what attitude he takes. He may have the very grin of a dirty hag or he may not. What threatens is its absence, the impossibility of your seeing, imagining at least his face. His plaited hair, shaggy hair of darkness. His eyes, something rough, monotonous and evil sometimes. But he may be handsome. He may come like a woman with bright hair, humid forehead, visible heart somewhere inside. Then you have no more doubts, you know that it is he, that he has corrupted everybody he has wished to, that he has sucked everybody’s soul and energy. No one can resist him any more. Except for the dawns. If you happen to die at night you come to enjoy, undoubtedly, the dawns.. That sky that gets mad at some unspeakable light. Reddish dark, reddish cavity of God’s lungs. Fire that breathes you in.
Earthquakes of still earth. Blind flight in the white cave of immortality. After he spent his night like a last life, after he spent life like a last homage brought to him, to the same death. After there was neither the day star nor the night stars¾moon and stars, all eaten by worms¾after he himself was only earth, with slender veins of blood hardly flickering, after all that, similar to the cloud, similar to the vulture, similar to the lizard, the beetle, the latest microb¾god, the day and night’s god, all that is seen and unseen, a master of all that has been missed. Not trodden any more by his feet coiling unconsciously in its lasting, revolting spasms. Not loved sung by his soles that toss, carried by the legs unconsciously coiling in their lasting revolting spasms. The shudder of those who are beside the silence of that living organic matter, troubled by all the acts of folly of the world. There, some place, between the legs and the brains, the constellations have broken, tangled, the light no longer passes through. Only the electric thrill. Only the bio-electric field where the galaxies of the cells, of the genes, howl bitten by the iron fangs of the void. There did Demiurgos settle his precipice. His gall, his hot temper, a creator of worlds. The black hole of the Apocalypse. The brains slowly buzz swung by the music of the spheres.
The Fool Forest
Every day we live in a fool forest for a few minutes. Our fool forest. Among its teeming trees. Smiling at our birth. Smiling at our death. Becoming fools. Leaving ourselves possessed.
But there is not fruitful foolishness. We do not reach the very borders of the vision. We hardly lie on a beach, eternal Laocoons in wait for the snakes that are to appear from the depths. Loving monsters coiled over our pleasures.
These monsters creeping in hexameters through the songs we try to murmur. Virgilian gleaming worms embalm our memory. They break the circles that enchain us.They change us into political men.
The unwritten Aeneids wait for our achievement. The countries lie down, starting from time to time because of the yearning for the conquering step. We have all in view. The gold and the coal, the petrol, the green forests, the black mines of diamond and uranium. The salt of the earth.
We have all in view. The small and the big crafts, springs of prosperity. The working laziness of the distance absorbs the velvet-like pace. Big lionesses biting their young at their necks. Flying skies under the birds. The dry beak of the mummy in a light tomb utters the prayer of glory.
Osana? This world looks intoxicated with happiness. The wilderness of the red skins animates the moral code. Small coloured fragments in anthropophagic hands. There follows contemporary silence.
The holy books. The saint’s martyrdom whose relics orbit the Earth. Man on the Moon. The Moon on the sky spread into a pompous grin. Venus. Mars and Jupiter. Sad Saturn. Neptune and Uranus. Zodiac signs overlapped, crossed, pumped in tubes for breathing. Liquid air. Ethereal death.
What do prophets say about life beyond? We are all completely masked. The swollen waters flow with a strong roar. Groups of mountains plough the void of some new theories in the sky. Oceans throb. Stars. The great artists watch over the perfection of creation.
We live in a fool forest. The psalms on our lips describe all as if a sweet departure. Neither upwards nor downwards. Bowing the submissive foreheads. The divine plan rebounds upon the temples just engraved. The uranic bells celebrate the first deluge.