Not because I think things
won’t be hurt
but because I’d be whipping for no reason.
I won’t stick my tongue out at you
so you won’t think I want to taste you.
I’m just talking to you.
It’s like sticking my tongue out halfway.
If you understand me – great.
Today, so long as you understand me, I’ll be happy.
Even delighted.
But only today.
If you don’t understand anything, I’ll be sad
and toward the end of the evening, – melancholic.
But not past this evening,
because at midnight
an angel is coming.
He will tell me:
– I have come to transform you!
– So transform me, I’ll tell him.
And he will, he’ll do it.
After that, I’ll go over to a horse
and say:
– Horse, I have come to transform you.
– Hee-haa, it will answer,
but I won’t know if I should
transform it
or even if it wants me to.
And I will not know whether I am to it
what the angel is to me.
– I have come to transform you, horse.
– Hee-haa, hee-haa, answers the horse.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0
From that revolting grub
came my will to write poetry.
From that came the habit
of enjoying the fact that my poetry can express
misery.
I was in the army, and being a private
with Private Ionel Vianu,
and being still up during a break,
we escaped from our bunk beds
when look, he
handily found a grub.
It had orange folds, it had
warts, if you can imagine it.
Hairy it was, and it had warts.
Illumined warts . . .
(Here God erased a good line.)
I’d better stop this talking.
But I can’t,
I want to justify myself.
Private Ionel Vianu let it run
from one palm into his other,
the revolting grub.
Watching it made me sick
and repulsed when I looked at it
and very very uneasy it made me
and I burped bile, the grub.
The soldier said to me:
– Do you see how it runs from one hand to the other?
Like the stain of a shadow, the soldier said to me.
It ran like a shadow’s stain
from one palm to another.
Like the stain of a shadow!
I repeated it, too:
– Like the stain of a shadow.
I utterly hated the grub,
but it ran from one palm into another,
from one of the soldier’s palms into the other
like the stain of a shadow.
This is where I get the habit
from loathing for the grub, I get the habit,
the stupid habit of writing poetry.
Like the stain of a shadow,
the soldier told me.
Like the stain of a shadow,
the soldier responded.
Beauty-Sick
I won’t say it was lucky
I met you.
I’ll only say it was a miracle.
Do your best not to die, my love,
try to not die if you can.
Me, my life is gone,
you, your luck is gone.
I’ll say no more than this,
the two of us lived
on a ball of earth.
Ars Amandi
I want to be him.
He wants to be a tree.
Trees want to be dogs,
dogs want to be birds.
Birds want to be stones,
stones want to be fish.
Fish want to be clouds,
clouds want to be fields.
Fields want to be horses,
horses want to be grass.
I want to be grass.
And If
If stones were bones,
ah, how they’d grow
with budding fingers . . .
If birds were air,
only feathers would I breathe,
only feathers . . .
And if waves
were oceans,
ah, look how we would go.
EPICA MAGNA
(Epica magna, 1978)
Paean
Feelings don’t have to be understood, –
just lived.
Pigs don’t have to be understood, –
just eaten.
Flowers don’t have to be understood, –
just smelled.
That bird doesn’t have to be understood, –
leave it alone;
don’t make your heart into a branch,
don’t drink its air with your breath,
the air below its wings . . .
We don’t need above all to understand, –
we just above all must be;
but we above all must have been,
really above all to have been.
Wheel with a Single Spoke
It smelled like a corpse from another planet.
Out of the horse’s spinal cord
some grass grew, and an egret.
It smelled like a corpse from another planet.
I shoved my heart into a stone
as my mother would plunge her hands into chocolate
when she cooked us air
thinking a bird would suffocate.
She’d tell us a story,
a story about a king
who used sunrays like a cane,
who saw a naked goddess in the light
and suddenly, wham!
Lord, what a smell!
It smelled like a corpse from another planet.
A tender nonbeing protected us like granite.
And all this happened in the time
the wheel had only one spoke
and it wasn’t called a wheel,
it was called a line.
Soldier Oedipus
If you weren’t afraid to be born
you won’t be afraid to die.
The lamb is not for eating
or sacrifice.
It is a seed
becoming a ram.
Take the blood-dirty sword out of your tent.
Take the dead man out of your tent.
His flesh is rusting.
The star
smells like a newborn child.
Wash yourself, –
seed and bullet . . .
What the animals left after they ate,
what they let fall out of their behinds, –
that’s what you are
and not even.
Phosphorescent snot, you traitor,
snot
you can see in the starless dark
night and day.
No one’s neglect are you,
no one’s non-desire are you.
To shoot at your own land
without knowing it’s your own mother.
You are not excused from this mess,
you stillborn fetus
by the sword the virgins pissed on.
Your weapon is the stain of light.
The mercy of spilled blood
will never adorn you.
We curse you:
May you be held by your own crime,
may you hold in your arms the rotting
dog of my heart.
May you never take part in death.
When you are thirsty
may you suck on a gravestone
the eye of a dead child.
Fire will be your shadow,
cold will be your fire!
May you burn without death,
you
who shoots his own land,
even if you didn’t know it was your mother.
May you survive your sin!
May you crave milk,
and drink stones.
. . . And may the gentleness you ruined
make you gentle and fresh as a blade of grass,
unhappy soldier, Daddy’s
dear and beloved,
Daddy’s little soldier,
dear and tragic and beloved.
Self-Portrait
I am nothing but
a bloodstain
that speaks.
Eye Squared
I can’t believe a bird can fly,
that it can glide on what is not,
or that you are in love with me
and I’m not even your dog.
An air of loss exists
and a stillness of black goats,
but neither have I inhaled
since I became your dog.
Don’t you have anyone else to hit
with that clang yanking out its own statue?
Here, boy, here I am, hit me!
Only I am your dog.
Oration
Nothing more ambiguous than a straight line,
nothing more painful than a wedding
. . . and more foreign than a party
on New Year’s
nothing is.
Nothing more free than sleep,
nothing more liberating than weariness
and compared to the young couple
who yesterday I saw kiss,
nothing is more of the past . . .
Nothing more durable than air
and nothing more invisible.
Forward Movement
for Arthur Lundkvist
I am a locomotive steaming
out of evaporating rails.
I am a bird flying
out of petrifying air.
I am a word spoken
that leaves behind a body.
I am time leaping
from a crystallizing hour.
I am grass
bent under verdancy.
I am hunger running
ahead of a gut.
I am one born
from a mother so true
as I am untrue.
To Feed Me from Your Hand
You’re distant now, Mama,
you don’t feed me from your tit,
but your hand.
We’re eating in the house now, Mama,
we’re eating in the dining room.
Your breast has turned to wood, Mama,
a table and glasses, the nipple of your tit.
Give us drink, Mama, to me and my friends,
and after we have whet our thirst for life
give us death, O Mama.
Haiku
A dog bites me,
ah, I peer through him
as through a window.
Another Haiku
Darkening dark
see
the gates of light.
Tableau with Blind People
Night starts to fall
over a house in the country
with a wooden table in the backyard
where they sit and drink and talk –
my parents and someone else’s
the mayor and stable hand
schoolteacher and priest
and some more people who sit and drink and talk.
At the same time
superimposed upon them
a man with a black cloak,
wounded by history
or whatever else,
goes off in the dusk over the field
getting smaller as he goes
dying as night falls.
Snippets of talk, clatter of forks and knives
glugs of pouring wine
and above everything
the schoolteacher shouting louder than anyone else:
– At the end of the day, what is life about?
And the priest shouting louder than anyone else:
– There are no signs, prayer is pointless.
And the mayor shouting louder than anyone else:
– Everything we see is the same! Always the same!
Superimposed upon the people at the table
crossing, it seems, through each one
in the field black with evening,
a man with a black cloak goes off,
his thoughts audible across the field:
I was born in the worst century possible,
I lived in the strangest heart possible!
That’s how his thoughts sounded
while he got smaller
like a black spot on a black spot
getting larger.
Heavy air and calm heat
beside the table in the yard, covered in shadow
untouched by the gasoline lamplight,
a mute rustle in the lantana bush.
A shiny eye with a matte shine,
an eye as big as the lantana bush
opens shiny and matte and closes.
The people at the table have their backs turned;
a second of silence then wine glugs into glasses.
Superimposed upon the rectangle of the table
far away, crossing the field
and cutting through the table at the same time,
a man with a black cloak
and behind the man with a black cloak
a hectare of black field opens suddenly,
an eye shining and opaque and black
closes as quickly as it opened
while the man goes off with his back turned.
A dog tied to an oak in the yard
yaps banging his chain,
the oak’s trunk opens
and a shining black eye blinks.
– Quiet, damn dog, shouts the stable hand,
and throws a mug at him.
A star widens like a pond
behind the man with a black cloak,
and a boulder at the gate
opens a shining black eye and closes it.
– I live in a strange heart, the man thinks,
one is the attention of zero,
two and three and four and five
are nothing other
than the non-attention of number one,
thinks the man with a black cloak, further off,
while behind him
the black horizon opens an eye,
immense, shining, and black,
and closes it.
My parents and someone else’s
sit at a wooden table in the yard
of a house in the country
and drink with the priest and mayor
with the schoolteacher and stable hand
and whoever else is at the table,
and superimposed upon them
a man in pain with a black cloak
crosses the field toward night.
Some speak, another thinks,
while large eyes open and
close behind them
and evening decomposes into night
and their meal in the yard never ends
and his walk with a black cloak in the field
never ends
and night runs into night
ever thicker, ever thicker.
Wedding Toast
Not how I am am I
but how you are am I
Not green, not yellow, not red,
but very green, very yellow, very red,
Not how I am am I
but how you are am I
Not purple, not very purple,
but very, very purple.
Not how I am am I
but how you are am I
a kind of you am I
that you would not let be me.
IMPERFECT WORKS
(Operele imperfecte, 1979)
&
nbsp; Lesson on the Cube
You take a piece of stone,
carve into it with blood,
polish it with Homer’s eye,
plane it with the sun’s rays,
until the cube is perfect.
Then you kiss the cube countless times
with your mouth, with others’ mouths,
especially with the mouth of la infanta.
Then you take a hammer
and bust a corner off the cube.
Everyone, but everyone, will say:
– What a perfect cube this would have been
if that corner wasn’t broken!
Hourglass
for Ioan Flora
I.
The eagle’s wing had a round hole,
like a ring of gold too tight
to crown the emperor’s forehead.
Through it nothing went toward nothing,
no one shone through its wing,
the no one who longs for nonexistence.
The eagle rose through the air, timidly
as if through the breath of a child, –
falling, first it became a turtle, then
white balls of hail, then
only the cold of him remained, only the cold.
When a hole was made
by its body into the earth
the smack of its fall
no one heard;
the grass was green and fresh,
its plumage changed color, to green.
Worms from the bowels of the earth
came to ask:
– Do you want magma or lapis lazuli?
– No, it responded, I want air,
air, I want air.
Worms from the bowels of the earth said:
– We have sand, can you breathe sand?
– No, I cannot breathe sand,
I have nothing to breathe sand with.
Worms from the bowels of the earth said:
– If you had a pyramid, could you breathe sand,
if you had a pyramid, could you breathe sand?
– No, the eagle responded,
I have no pyramidal thought, the eagle said,
I have no pyramidal thought.
– Then what do you have? asked worms from the bowels of the earth,
then what do you have, what do you have, then?
– I don’t, said the eagle, I don’t have anything;
my only property is absence,
a round hole in my wing instead of a sun.
I don’t, said the eagle, I don’t,