of determined shores, of nerves and bones.
To Galatea
I know your every hour, every movement, every scent,
and your shadow, your silence, your breast,
how they tremble and what colors precisely,
and your gait, your melancholy, your eyebrows,
and your blouse, your ring, and moment,
and my patience runs out and I drive my knee against the stone
and I beg you,
give birth to me.
I know everything that is far from you,
who can say what exists that far away,
after noon, after the horizon, beyond the sea . . .
and all beyond all of them,
who can say what something that far off is called.
That’s why I bend my knee to meet
the twin knee of stone.
And I beg you,
give birth to me.
I know all you never knew,
the heartbeat past the beat you hear,
the end of the word when you spoke just a syllable,
trees – wooden shadows of your veins,
rivers – shifting shadows of your blood,
and stones, stones – stone shadows
of my knee,
which I bend before you and I beg,
give birth to me. Give birth to me.
Old Soldier’s Song
The moon is heavy on my face,
my chest, and on my memory,
it will weigh on me like platinum,
until I drop the flag of glory.
Until I bend my knee,
and the tearing makes me scream,
like a narrowing viaduct
that batters trees with stony rain.
Until I lift the heel
I pressed upon your hour,
until it tarnishes, the loneliness
that covers me in silver.
Sad Love Song
Only my life will truly die for me,
but who knows when.
Only grass knows how earth tastes.
Only my blood truly longs
for my heart, as it moves on.
Tall is air, tall is you,
tall is my sadness.
A time will come when horses die.
A time will come when cars rust.
A time will come when rain is cold
and every woman has your head on
and wears your dresses.
A bird will come, large, white,
and lay the egg of the moon.
To Bend the Light
I.
I tried to string the light
like Ulysses strung his bow in the stone hall
of the suitors.
I tried to bend the light
like a branch whose only leaf
was the sun.
But the light, in cold vibration, pulled
off my arms,
and sometimes they grew back,
other times, not.
I tried to pull the light down,
to break it over my knee like a sword,
but the edge slipped from my hands,
and cut off my fingers.
Oh, they fell on the ground
rapping
like a wild spring rain, or
rolling like drums that foretell evil.
And I waited,
and sometimes my fingers
grew back,
other times, not.
And I took the light in my arms
like a tree trunk
and begged permission
to bend it,
but it would tilt just enough
to throw my head against the rocks,
my legs kicking toward the stars,
like two Turkish warlords howling
for a helmet knocked across a battlefield.
II.
I tried to bend the light.
I hung on to it with both hands,
and every evening,
I dropped down to the stones, my head sparking
on impact.
The thick, black oil of nighttime dreams
not blood
spurted from my forehead
and spread around me like a pool,
like a lake rising
against a single shore –
the bone of my brow.
Everything moved far from me,
like the heart, before death.
Everything was closer to me
than a retina wounded by light.
I was on the edge of a black lake
with a single shore
(the bone of my brow)
and I could see through it, like
through a magnifying glass.
III.
I looked through the black glass
of nighttime dreams,
deep into the earth,
and lindens over their shadows,
my hands fell beside smooth stones,
half in darkness, half in light.
My eyelids fell battered
by ancient skies never seen before.
(Outside, a gaze broke
and fell, floating alone.)
The light fell in round spaces
unraveled into shakes and waves,
it hit the edges and unheard
blacker and blacker hummed the sound.
IV.
But corpses fill the depths of the earth
and there is no room, no room, no room
for questions.
Like roots, dead skeletons
twist the quick of the earth, and wring
the lava out, until it loses its mind.
Here there is never room, no room, no room,
even time must enter time
like facing mirrors.
Even memories must enter memories,
and my childhood face
has ten eyes squeezed together,
ready to pile all their images together
in a deadly mound.
I was dizzy, I looked into the quick of the earth –
from every age
hung a body
less and less filled out,
less material,
like a worm cut into bait
to hook the years.
Here there is never room, no room, no room.
The black lens of nighttime dreams
will not reveal even one fissure
where I could lay down
and put a question to rest.
The quick of the earth is full
of homes of corpses,
and there is no room, no room, no room,
for questions.
There are ten skulls in a skull.
There are ten shanks in a shank.
There are ten sockets in an eye socket.
Everything ramifies downward,
an uninterrupted root of bone
that wrings out of itself
black death, black lava,
pits and cores, lost time.
V.
I was trying to string the light
when the bow suddenly straightened
and hurled me upward.
And I found myself slowly at first, then
faster
and then
flashing like thought alone
can congeal into constellations of words –
yes, I found myself sliding
its long, shifting spears,
their butts stuck in the sun,
their points eternally running
toward I-don’t-know-what, toward I-don’t-know-when.
And as I flashed,
as earth-free as the inside of a cloud,
it seemed I was and was not
toward the past, from the future,
toward what was from what will be,
a number going down,
five,
four,
three,
f
rom ten thousand, maybe thousands of thousands.
VI.
That’s how I caught up to them, and passed
the spikes of light,
ancient images torn from the earth.
Like an iron plow that turns over
and throws aside
fat clods of earth,
light cuts through chaos and fills it
with faces, images, seeds
drawn from the blue husk of the globe
it plowed in time and
left somewhere behind.
So I found myself among images
playing among spokes of light,
as thick as sunrise over the ocean
when fireflies are born.
They slide and swarm into a mane
of bitter, tumbling suns,
then they dissipate and unravel
into a whirlpool of cold colors,
passionate but scared,
lucid but innocent,
recombined into meaning.
Laugh, eye: shatter your horizon
and observe and encapture, forever.
Let the cascade of light flood
the famished cave of my soul.
O feet, quiet steps on a threshold.
Adolescence – play it back to me again.
I climb down my rediscovered bodies
like a ladder,
even memories have bodies, even time has spores.
And look, my forgotten friends and first love
and the seventh year of my life rediscovered,
my first yes and first no,
first surprise,
and the air of that time
impaled on a sunray.
VII.
I fell into my heart
like sand through an hourglass.
I fell into my child’s heart
like a horse into winter snow.
I fell into a heart that
existed less from
touching me
and fell more quiet.
Each beat was a further wave,
and I swam, swam, and every blow
of my arm pushed
the shores
further from my surroundings.
I swam, I swam
in the sea of innocence,
loneliness of past radiance.
I swam, in a hovering
transparent ocean, I swam.
VIII.
What am I doing, I asked myself, what am I doing
among the glimmers of old innocence
these tips of light, rattling
dead spectacles, unraveled
in lonely spaces? . . .
It is my present, more alive
than reveling light,
I sense the advent of even greater miracles
more than the ordinary years
of my life’s beginning: rhomboids, lines
traveling the cold tips of light . . .
So I pulled myself out of the gentle mirage
rarefied like the air over great rocks
when the vision of light decorated my eye
with an extra brow.
IX.
Everything goes up from silver.
The mysteries of icy winds had been abolished.
I added air to air, green, to leaves,
love, to hearts, sky, to grass,
but more important, another presence
to the present.
Everything began from this fulfillment.
Hope was thicker than light.
That which conquered became real
like a solemn preparation
for a sunrise
reflected in a newborn’s eye.
Everything took shape from that scream
pouring out of things, which,
with them, became the things.
I love you, I shouted, present moment of my life,
and my shout
shattered into comets.
II ELEGIES
(11 Elegii, 1966)
The Second Elegy, in the Style of the Getes
for Vasile Pârvan
Every rotten tree trunk had a god.
If a stone cracked open, fast
they put a god in there.
All it took was for a bridge to break
and a god went in the gap,
or for the street to have a pothole
and a god went in there.
Never cut your hand or foot,
not by mistake or on purpose.
They will put a god in the wound,
like they do everywhere, in every place,
they will put a god in there
and tell us to bow, because he
protects everything that leaves itself behind.
Take care, O warrior, do not lose
your eye,
because they will come and put
a god in the socket,
and he will stay there, turned to stone, and we
will move our souls to praise him . . .
And even you will uproot your soul
to praise him like you would a stranger.
The Fourth Elegy
The battle of the visceral and the real
I.
Once vanquished without,
the Medieval Era withdrew into
the red and white cells of my blood.
Into a cathedral with pulsing walls it withdrew,
where it constantly emits and absorbs believers
in an absurd cycle
through an absurd area,
and feeds on pieces of the moon
in its desire to exist
it gnaws on them in secret, at night,
while the eyes of the world sleep
and
only the teeth of those who talk in their sleep
appear in the dark,
like a meteor shower
glistening,
they rise and fall in rhythm.
Once vanquished without,
the Medieval Era withdrew into me
and
my own body does not
understand me anymore
and
my own body hates me,
so that it can continue to exist
it hates me.
Thus
it hurries to fall
asleep,
one evening after the next;
and in winter
ever more powerful, it wraps itself
in layers of ice,
quaking and beating and
drowning me deep in itself
trying
to kill me so it could be free
and not-killing me,
still be lived by someone.
II.
But pyres are stacked everywhere inside me,
waiting,
and long, shadowy processions
wear auras of pain.
Pain of a world torn in two
so it can pass through my eyes, two.
Pain of sounds of the world torn
in two,
so they can beat my eardrums, two.
Pain of smells of the world
torn in two,
so they can reach my nostrils, two.
And you, oh you, inner reshaping,
you, paired halves, like
the embrace of a man and his woman,
oh you, and you, and you, and you,
the solemn smack
of halves torn apart,
whose slow flame, so slow
almost a lifetime of flame
rises
to light the pyres, the awaited
foretold, the savior,
the lighting of the pyres.
The Fifth Elegy
The temptation of the real
I was never angry with apples
for being apples, with leaves for being leaves,
with shadow for being shadow, with birds for being birds.
But apples, leaves, shadows, birds,
all of a sudden, were angry with me.
See me taken before the court of leaves,
the court of shadows, apples, birds,
round courts, flying courts,
courts cool and thin.
See me condemned for ignorance,
boredom, disquiet,
stasis.
Sentences written in the language of seeds.
Indictments sealed
with the innards of birds,
cool, ashen atonements, chosen for me.
I rise, head uncovered,
and I try to understand what I deserve
for stupidity . . .
and I cannot, I cannot understand
anything,
and this state itself
grows angry with me
and condemns me, in a way impossible to understand,
to perpetual waiting,
to harmonize meanings with themselves
until they take the form of apples, leaves,
shadows,
birds.
The Eleventh Elegy
Entry to the Labors of spring
I.
Heart larger than the body,
leaping from all sides at once
and collapsing from all sides,
back over the body
like a shower of lava,
you, content larger than form, here’s
self-knowledge, here’s
why suffering matter takes birth from itself:
so it can die.
Only he dies who knows himself,
only he is born who is
his own witness.
I need to run, I told myself,
but to do that first I should
pivot my soul
toward my unmoving ancestors,
who have withdrawn into the towers of their bones,
like marrow,
unmoved
like all things taken to their end.
I can run, because they are inside me.
I will run, because only what is
unmoved in itself
can move,
only he who is alone in himself
has company and knows the unrevealed heart
will collapse more powerfully toward its own
center
or,
shattered into planets, will surrender
to fauna and flora,
or
will lie beneath the pyramids,
like the hidden stomach of a strange breast.
II.
Everything is simple, so simple that
it becomes incomprehensible.
Everything is so close, so
close, that
it slips behind the eyes
and is seen no more.
Everything is so perfect
in spring,
that only by surrounding it with myself
can I mark it,
like expanding grass marked
by words for the speaking mouth,
marked by the mouth of the heart,