To Oneself
(Cãtre Sine)
To N.V.
You see I think I suffer from a melancholic disease
Through my pores I feel a fluid sound that keeps working
For whom after all? I can’t answer this question myself
I ought to have obeyed the seven commandments but I don’t
I ought to have had a son by the age of twenty-seven but I haven’t
I ought to have written to you but I didn’t have the guts to start
Don’t worry, your lively image I still bear in my mind
Before your pages my fingers met few tens of times
Withdrawing every time wavering in the economy of the syllables
With no regret no pains so hard
Accompanying the breath of the blood in the aorta
The only one that could recreate the very image of the world.
Long cavalcades make ready for October the leafless mulberry trees
Theirbranchestwistedwitholdsmallarbalestsinthequartz-liketranslucenceof autumn
Give late effects beneath the ground
In cauda venenum, in cauda venenum
The cutaneous covering of senses at work dislocates the free atoms of oxygen
While all estranged from yourself blinded by yourself
You pass on following their cause in the absence
Assumed End
(Final Presupus)
You eat baked green peppers, you wolf tomatoes and cucumbers
You have no suspicions you scale the fish quickly
You remove the scales from the smooth flesh
The bowels you take out of the belly
Of this peripharastic reality you get upset
You check out the punctuation of the noon no longer at work
(strange, isn’t it?) Take the first letter of the alphabet
So much mess, so much ardour in this detailed description
Of our little cowardice
Oh, could I take after no one
Oh, could I postpone as long as possible
this assumed end
Winter Like An Allegory
(Iarna Ca O Alegorie)
Because of the cold a star has fallen
(The star of loneliness)
Hardly outlined this allegory so much of a companion
For winter where the straggling trees
Grow up from the very mist of history and then vanish
In the fog thicker and thicker
On the damp sheet of paper on which I keep writing
Who keeps questioning his poor faithful body?
Who keeps taking with him a heart that beats up till his dying day?
A white stone upon a black stone:
So I count my lucky days like a dead man who’s alive
Between the two equal halves that promise each other happiness
Who still thrills on (I wish I knew)
Because of the human need to feel
How an unspoken thought worrying in itself glides aside?
Who increases this false beauty of the day
Among so many spurious and useless details amassed-
Small furry animals nestling into the snow?
White cold fall in the circle that gets narrow
We pass for a species that is most mysterious
How in dark silence we swiftly descend the ladder of air
Among the straggling trees
Deep ever deeper in the heart of the cold of an aberrant sickly closing
Where no one is allowed
the little courage of his loneliness
Apocrypha
(Apocrifa)
Ex nihilo nihil
A blood-stain on the page
A blood-stain keeps getting bigger and bigger
In the margin of my own way of existing
Et Cetera
(Et Caetera)
Will Shakespeare Our Lord that you are and yet you are not
Take a stone in your mouth if you want to come back to Earth
Deliver us from spleen and disgust
Your will be done in the much disputed matter of literature
Give us satisfaction, increase the number printed, turn if you can
The editors into grave diggers or country priests to cross the muddy roads
Do publish a review if others can’t
Do dry our bourgeois manners prone to extol
As if a useless tree
Yell exultantly if you wish a green leaf song
Make them all happy
With the honey on their fingers…
Criza De Inspiratie / Lack of Inspiration
To hear the grass grow under the wild sky
Voracious ravens giving a genuine show
On the tile roof of the day
Applause alternating with short intervals of rain
Newspaper rustling little troubles
Rights and obligations
The chase of the prophets in honour of
Some genius of the day…
With no more imagination left
I won’t leave the house in order to see
The rotten fair of the lack of inspiration
Mixture of candour and confusion
And so I choose between your breast given to the two-month baby
And the deep strong matrimonial love:
The song of a canary in a cage
Under the open sky
Today July 31, 1987
Who will be wakening me from my daydream?
(Traduceri de Olimpia IACOB
