Autumn Love
Autumn is here, cover my heart with something,
the shadow of a tree, or better, the shadow of you.
Sometimes I’m afraid I will see you no more,
that my sharp wings might grow up to the clouds,
that you’ll hide within an odd eye,
and it will shut under a wormwood leaf.
Then I step toward the rocks and fall silent,
I pick words up and drown them in the ocean.
I whistle the moon to rise and make it
into a great emotion.
THE RIGHT TO TIME
(Dreptul la timp, 1965)
The Right to Time
I.
Even rocks sprouted that day,
with winter at zenith above the earth
and within the shell of spherical hours
beat rock-smasher, Phoenix wings.
And the air
suddenly compacted,
suddenly petrified like a frozen sea
that crushes within itself
corpses
rising toward the surface.
In that earthshaken February, battle-ready,
the land requested its natural right
to time,
like color for the eye
and the bud of hearing
on the eardrums.
In that earthshaken February, battle-ready,
with the thick whistle toward the future
of anchors thrown,
strength knotted in pleats of air,
the hawks’ throats suddenly blocked.
And the girders of the sky, in place,
were covered with white wings
imagining air yet to be,
raised to another, more worthy foundation.
In that earthshaken February, battle-ready,
the eyes of rifles
gazed long, with bullets,
at our head and raised chest,
their lords not imagining time had frozen
their bodies clenched within a block
ever denser, ever deeper.
Even rocks sprouted that day,
with Winter at zenith and glistening.
A veil of death covered dreams over,
when death killed nothing but itself.
II.
A rush of white clouds, a rush of long clouds
drove each second.
In earthshaken February,
a woman gave birth into the world,
her son receiving his right to time.
She shot into the air
the stone arrow
of a scream.
The child’s body rose
heavy and sure, like the moon,
from seawater.
And a horizon appeared, of women
who covered the globes of their earthly bellies
with black aprons.
A horizon appeared, of pregnant women
who gazed upon her.
A woman gave birth into the world.
In February, under the wheel of freezing wind,
birth pains embraced her,
like a man much too strong,
with arms of lead.
A rush of white clouds, a rush of long clouds
drives each second, strikes them,
thins them . . .
A second may meander
through forges, cables,
walls, along railways it meanders
it finds a woman’s eye and shines through,
it finds a woman’s cheek and colors it,
it finds a woman’s mouth and makes it arc,
it finds a woman’s scream and makes it into
a pillar of the sky.
And a horizon appeared, of women
who covered the globes of their earthly bellies
with black aprons.
A horizon appeared, of pregnant women
who gazed upon her.
The child’s body, heavy and sure
continued to rise
like a heart drumming,
like a planet breaking away
from a sun.
In February, under the wheel of freezing wind,
the great flag of snow
fell, dew-wet, to the earth.
And the soldiers’ hobnailed boots
tore the flag apart, in rhythm
and iron runners from sleds with
brass bells
sliced the flag into bandages,
for the reddened temples,
battered shoulders,
and gunshot chests
of those who stood guard.
But a woman gave birth into the world.
her child received
his right to time,
just as great questions receive
their answer
in history.
And a horizon appeared, of women
who covered the globes of their earthly bellies
with black aprons.
A horizon appeared, of pregnant women
who smiled, heavy and trusting.
III.
But then the woman felt
her arms could not hold the boy
any more than yours could lift
a river.
She felt him break away
from her breast
as words do
from the mouth.
The warmth of his being
– she felt –
rose up on the warmth of her body
toward petrified clouds.
And all of this seems
unchangeable,
the way you cannot temper
an event
that took place in the past.
The woman then felt
that her son ran glistening
toward the great toothed wheels
of the seasons,
that he threw his shadow onto them,
whipping them,
that the biting lashes turned the cogs
with a high whistle,
and winter threw its frozen bodies
onto the carcass of spring leaves,
and spring threw its shivering trees
onto the swollen summer ocean,
and the sun of summer, slipping, hit
and shook the fruits of autumn loose.
And autumn drove its prow
like an icebreaker
into the white quick of winter,
and parted and crushed
and shattered and broke it.
The woman shot a glistening
arrow into the air,
a cry of joy
for her son.
February watched over him.
It touched his white and shining shoulder
like one who draws sound
from a harp,
and truly, there he was.
Its hands caressed him, its sight,
hearing, smell, taste,
its everything at once,
and he was alive and unhurt.
February watched over him.
And embraced him
the way the heart does its blood
and the mind ideas, so was he, complete,
and he received his natural right
to time,
the way the open eye receives
the face of things that laugh or cry.
February watched over him.
Bas-relief with Heroes
The young soldiers sit in a glass case
the way they were found, shot in the forehead,
so they could be seen, they sat in a glass case,
holding their last movements,
the profile, arm, knee, their last movements,
when they were shot by surprise in the forehead
or between the shoulder blades with a flame more fragile
than the finger of a child pointing at the moon.
They left behind an empty barracks
that sme
lled like ankle-wraps, cigarette butts, like a closed window.
Wooden suitcases filled the barracks
and rattled their iron handles
like the moon rattles its iron handles
just before it’s opened
to look for the old letters and old photographs
of time.
The young soldiers were smeared with wax
on their faces and hands, to shine,
rubbed with wax to shine, rubbed with wax,
and set exactly as they were the moment
when life broke and death swallowed the moment.
They are still, never not shining,
and we look at them like we might look at a moon
rising from the middle of the square.
For our sake, now that we are the same age,
even though they’ve spent many years inside the case,
for our sake, we who have caught up with and passed them,
who have a heart that beats, and memory,
a fresh, utterly fresh memory,
the young soldiers sit in a glass case
and mock each other constantly
as though they were alive.
Enkidu
My friend Enkidu is dead. Together, we killed lions.
from the EPIC OF GILGAMESH
I.
Look at your hands and rejoice, for they are absurd.
And look at your feet, in the evening, as you stand straight
and hang toward the moon.
I may be too close for you to see me,
but even this is not nothing.
I will become distance, to fit your eyes,
or a word, with sounds the size of ants,
to fit your mouth.
Touch your ear and laugh and wonder at your touch.
I ache, even in the brief transit.
I stretched my gaze until it hit a tree,
and there it was!
Look at my shoulders, and tell yourself they are the
strongest you’ve seen, aside from grass and bison,
who are like that for no reason.
My shoulders shift distance, like a leather bag
pushed by a windmill.
This is why when lights I have not touched
burn the backs of my eyes
a gentle blue pain passes above the crown of my head
in place of the sky.
And if I ache with rivers,
rocks, a length of ocean,
just enough for everything to be my bed,
never enough to fit my thought’s
eternal expansion, oh, then there’s no way I’ll know
how you also ache, and I am not the one
to whom I speak.
II.
So something would exist between us – maybe
me – I baptized what I had done,
wounding myself,
always making myself smaller, always dying,
by words from my own lips.
And the great pain, I called it blue
for no reason, or just because that’s how
my lips smiled.
I ask you whether you, smiling,
would call another pain the same?
Surely, the height I threw away from my sight,
like a spear never to return,
you caressed differently, because your hands,
my twins, are absurd, and we should
rejoice in these words passing
from one mouth to another like an invisible river,
for they do not exist.
O, friend, how is your blue?
III.
A game of passes, some fast, some slow,
before my eye and with me creating the
trees, stones, and river,
over my slower body
dragged along by thought, like goats at evening,
by a rope.
Time, alone everywhere, myself,
and after that.
IV.
And when everything is erased, like seas inside a shell,
there’s nothing anymore, except in the eyes of those
who are not, the passage of pain into the passages
of time, O, my friend, when I am like someone,
I will not be, because one thing like another
does not exist.
What is unique is in pain, measured like eddies
in the mountains, the passage of time,
knowing it is alone,
changing the names of surrounding things.
V.
Whatever is not limitless is,
it travels everywhere, encountering the wide marks
I call Time.
Whatever is not everywhere is, it swallows
my legs up to the knees, beats the elbow of my heart,
on my mouth it dances.
What is not timeless is, the way a memory is.
Like the vision of hands, it is,
like the hearing of eyes.
VI.
I die with every thing I touch,
with rotating stars, with sight;
with every shadow I cast over the sand,
a little less soul remains, a thought
stretches a bit further; I look
at everything as though I see death, only seldom
do I forget, and then I create dances
and songs from nothing, shrinking myself and pulling out
my throbbing temples, to turn them into crowns of myrtle.
VII.
Come out of the tent, friend, so we can be face-to-face,
can look at each other, be quiet together, always asking
whether the other is,
and how he senses himself.
Game of tumbling, with stones,
shaken out of somewhere, toward somewhere else.
Ars Poetica
I taught my words to love,
I showed them my heart
and would not give up until their syllables
did not start to beat.
I showed them trees
and what words wouldn’t rustle
I hanged, without pity, from the branches.
In the end, words
needed to resemble both me
and the world.
Then
I came to me,
I braced myself between two banks
of a river,
to present a bridge,
a bridge between a bull’s horn and grass,
between black stars of light and earth,
between the temple of a woman’s head and a man’s,
letting words travel over me
like racing cars, electric trains,
only so they could cross faster,
only so they would learn to transport the world,
from itself,
to itself.
The Chariot
for Mihai Eminescu
A chariot whistles across the field
of my moments.
Four horses pull two warriors.
One has his eyes on leaves, the other,
his eyes in tears.
One lodges his heart ahead, in the horses,
the other drags it behind, over stones.
One holds reins in his right hand,
the other, sadness in his arms.
One is beset by his weapons,
the other by his memories.
A chariot whistles across the field
of my moments.
Four black horses pull two warriors.
One lodges his life in eagles,
the other in the tumbling wheels,
and the horses run, until their muzzles shatter
the moment,
they run beyond, they run far beyond
and vanish.
Savonarola
Savonarola came to me and said:
Let’s burn all the trees on the bonfire of vanities,
let’s burn all the grass, wheat, and corn
,
and make everything a little simpler.
Let’s shatter the rocks, let’s pluck
the rivers from their beds and make
everything simpler, a lot simpler.
Let’s renounce our legs,
for walking is vanity.
Let’s renounce our sight,
for the eye is vanity.
Let’s renounce our hearing,
for the ear is vanity.
Let’s renounce our hands
and make everything simpler,
a lot simpler!
Savonarola came to me in a dream,
like a scar deep in the brain of the world.
He came to me in a dream
and I woke up shouting and screaming.
Bas-relief with Lovers
Again, we are ourselves no more,
we know no more where we begin
nor where we end, in given space,
placed on the pillar of these seconds.
Again, our bodies shaped in bas-relief
exist out from us, that is,
just one half of us can move,
that side turned to the world.
Again, all is centered on the eye,
the brow, just the cheek,
just the arm outstretched is all,
whatever else will cease to be.
Inscribed within a circle,
we know no more where we begin
nor where we end, in given space,
placed on the pillar of these seconds.
Song
The present is made only of memories.
What was, no one truly knows.
The dead constantly trade
names, numbers, one, two, three . . .
There is only what will be,
only happenings yet unhappened,
hanging from an unborn branch
half a phantom . . .
There is only my frozen body,
final, stony, and feeble.
My sadness hears how unborn dogs
bark at unborn people.
Only they will truly be.
We who live these moments,
we are a nighttime dream,
a svelte, scampering millipede.
To the right, and then to the left
listed the demented skiff,
depending on how I embraced you,
or on the smell of algae or mint.
It scribed a flashing alphabet,
in cuttlefish, water, and gar.
Its words were only four:
I am, you are . . .
And gallantly they seemed to drown
in the glare, monotonous, bland,
or lazily through lazy clouds
they crossed the Flying Dutchman . . .
Beloved zigzag, almost dreamed,
with sargasso seas below,
a heart free from the slavery