The carelessness of being
Living carelessly by the garages
As if nothing bad could ever happen to them
Lighting up with their glowing rashes
The treasures of the garbage bins
Dogs pups puppies bitches
A canine group settled in the courtyard of our block of flats
They bark sleepless apathetic angry
In their mysterious life and never care
That their twanging veins sing under the stars
Under the inclement fingers of the mad harpist
That ash
five children almost naked on one knoll
show me how they’re able to levitate
with an effort to concentrate in their left temple
I try it and cry with joy
and if you cry they shout the earth will soon
be far away and it’ll never come back to you
I rise away in the evening air
and suddenly the temple starts hurting
and the left arm too up to the shoulder
It’s that ash that sifts and sifts
Over the children of yesteryear
Nevermind the light stays
And Alexandru my brother is dead
and the buns ordered
and Christmas upon us
On the night train
a young woman always somebody else’s
comes to warn us
Us the poor the squanderers the occasional football fans
and what an occasion
and what squanderers
I’ve got to herd the whole stud in the farmstead
And all the burnt oil
tonight it might freeze
I don’t know why I turn my head anymore
to see if you’re coming or not
when it’s clear so very clear
Nevermind
the light stays with us the road is wide the future
near and the snow reaches as high up as our heads
On the brain
A poet called me the other day to say
he was sending over some money
he’d got more funding than he expected
Once upon a time in my youth I had in mind
to write in sequences of three lines
a sort of ter(n)cets entirely without rigour
Today as I do the same
only that they’re just notes
about how I pass the time
The potatoes keep boiling
they’ll soon be done I’ll turn off
the stove and go out
Where there’s frost now frost
directly on the brain
with which last night I dreamt stuff
Exhilarations
The boys are home again
the one who’s had his fill of St. John’s bread and the one
in the field with cattle and lambs and everything
we bought new chairs
and a new table
as for me my graying writing’s back
sun clouds drowsiness food dishes washed
power maddens
the young as well as the old
today is yesterday and the nearlynothing stays
in the neighbourhood
like a fire that didn’t make it
and the hard part of my job:
to remember time to sing the absolutions
to exit together by the way we came
Malignant music
It’s bleak outside
I’m free dizzy and clean
and full of tenderness
Last night’s dreams have faded
all of them I forgot
Oh God, the badly dressed stars at Astoria beer garden
and as a consequence the earning
of more money
The hungry knock at the windows their families
strewn along the river bank
and all through the years
This Sunday ends the Celebration
Monday Tuesday etcetera follow an’ then
I’m coming home today
with my senses bashful enormous
Us fellas
as English and American best-selling novels show
the world goes to pot all the time
in ways sometimes enchanting sometimes sordid
it doesn’t matter, I still haven’t read the whole way to the wall
soon we will have a new minister of external affairs
but us fellas, the cronies of the lady Ignota
we’re already looking for a refuge, several refuges
for a fugue an art of excess
in the cave where the angel and other notabilities
will do themselves all our for work for us
Really
living in the desperation of our tenderness
angels and pigeons come to our window
just pigeons really
toxic neurotic dumb pigeons
in an incontinent blue flutter
ay, I used to have an aunt myself
aunt Tina
she’s six feet under now under the cross as they say
in the vanished village (well, almost vanished)
now we always bathe in other waters
now we sit on the bench
and the nurse comes takes the little bottles to the lab
then to have the results read
a synthesis expected later this evening
when it’s made its reckoning
the light has
Let us think of Günther, Goethe says, in Poetry and Truth
A poet in the true sense of the word
a true talent
endowed with sensitivity imagination memory
power of insight and representation
very prolific
adroit in his meter
witty playful and on top of it all very erudite
in brief, he had everything that was needed to create through poetry
in life a second life
one real and common
He knew not how to discipline himself
and thus his life was squandered as his poetry
Traducerea în limba engleză/Translation: Rareş MOLDOVAN