it will cut its root to start,
then its suckling leaves
and dentations
breaking light apart.
Ah, thus the only ah, thus inward
toward myself, from myself,
the furthest sky away is
nightfall’s coastal shelf.
III.
I absorb the news that my right leg has departed.
I pour wisdom into the left,
idol of flesh, and smart.
Neither one is your friend,
neither two, neither no one . . .
Blood comes with the soul, just that:
Eat it, sister heart, eat it
yesterday and the day before.
IV.
Flee forward, always forward,
from the four holy chambers.
My gut is my friend, my ankle my parent,
the road has no return.
Blood speaks,
its valve, vein, artery,
the white bone inside speaks,
the viscera, the zither.
The cell speaks, the lymph speaks
the mobile brick of the tongue, –
the end of every bone will speak,
melting in the movement of nimbi, nimbus.
The Tower of Babel turned with its glove
inside out, –
heart, bedbug, mare, hetaera,
inside out . . .
Thus a pyramid
thus a pyramid
thus a pyramid
V.
My only prey is my life.
I can only lose my life.
Everything happens in my lifetime.
My heart defeats my blood
and then
my heart chases my blood away.
My blood inflates my heart.
My only prey is my life,
yes.
My only prey is my life.
All I can lose, all I can lose,
but who can say
what I may lose!? . . .
But what does “who” mean
or “to lose,” Lord
what is “to lose” – “loss”?
I slept with all my bones along a sword blade,
until the sword became my spine,
until a cloudlike body and the sliding
moment were enveloped in its shine.
That’s why I put my temple to things, my ear
my eardrum, my what I am,
trying to sever it from its pair,
its shadow, the earthen dam.
But things will laugh in their own language
at my victory, its glory,
at reddened eyebrows, silent muscles,
the way I break the sword in two, or three.
Sleeping and Waking
Since I couldn’t understand a single thing
and neither could you,
I thought we made a nice pair.
We confessed to each other
our darkest secret –
that we existed . . .
But that was night, and oh, in the morning,
what a terrible vision,
I awoke with my head against you:
you yellow, you haystack, you wheat.
And I thought – Lord,
what kind of bread am I going to be,
me,
and who will eat it?
Decree
I may be forgotten, because
I don’t care for my arms. I may lose them.
I may be abandoned, because
I don’t love my legs. I can walk
just as well with air.
I may be left alone, because
my blood will pour into the sea
in any case.
There’s room. My ribs have all risen
like sea walls.
There’s enough light. My eyes
see only one mask.
But it does not yet exist,
so there’s room, there’s room, there is.
The beating moon inches across the roof of the mouth
Soon it reaches the teeth
and the scrape of enamel is heard,
long words
with seven heads,
breaking free.
Cautiously, it comes to the lips:
nothing more is heard, in silence
the lines of my teeth advance,
barely visible, row by row.
It floats in the air for a time, and a bird
jabs its wing into the moon, there is some flapping,
then nothing more. It must
have stuck the other wing
my teeth have arrived, and now they glitter in the sky.
Higher, and higher, Excelsior! I hear myself shouting.
You will let them bite you soon
to make room for the moon to pass, the victor.
Higher, and higher, Excelsior!
Mime
Too quickly they change, what we call
moods,
as though a mime
kept falling asleep in the barracks,
in an unending line of beds overlapped inside me.
The tired mime, his mouth on a cold stone,
evaporates from the bottom bed,
in order to condense on the bed above
even sadder and more beautiful.
The mime’s vague edges
do not distinguish truth from a lie,
choking them to sleep, together
upon the same pillow.
Sliding toward cold, from heat,
and then toward the burning,
highest bed, the tenth
in the aurora borealis.
A curse, yes, when you can always begin from the beginning,
your life unborn.
Poetry
for Matei Călinescu
Poetry is an eye that cries
a shoulder that cries
a shoulder’s eye that cries
It is a hand that cries
a hand’s eye that cries
It is a sole that cries
a heel’s eye that cries
O friends,
poetry is not a tear
it is crying itself
the crying of an uninvented eye
a tear
from one who should be beautiful,
a tear from one who should be glad.
Song of Three
We are two, you are alone,
so we let you do what you want.
We give you two hearts;
one we keep in me,
the other we keep in you.
Your face we make
like our face,
the way coins match
the two brutal stamps
when the coiner gives them birth.
We are two branches of you,
one shooting toward the moon,
with your love of the sky,
the other shooting from your belly,
with your love of the earth.
We and you wanted to be one.
But matter hates truth
and, to punish us, made us three.
We are two and you are alone
so you are the master,
so you are the queen,
because we two are the same.
But nothing is the same as another thing
except in boring stories about happiness.
Laughing Tears
Eyelid with teeth, with a tooth-marked tear
and food that lacks its salt,
the proof I cannot live in the present
are my memories, one and all.
The proof I cannot see without a witness
are my childhood and adolescence,
doubling the nonbeing of these seconds
with nonbeing from some other time.
Ah, laughing tears
ah, laughing tears
break over me when I talk
to the old moment rotting in the
current
moment. Ah, laughing tears
ah, laughing tears
in the eye of cold things
and the tooth, like the scepter
of uninvented kings.
Murderous Memory
Vision did not go straight ahead, rather
it circumambulated things, went over
to a pillar in a corner, dark ogive, and
interrupted sleep, below an unmoved star.
Parting, you made a friendly gesture
rustling your hand like leaves,
soul of spider, soul of a horse,
like a sail slowly unweaving
or like the shadow of a horseshoe, bleeding
over each approaching moment.
A long row of eyes tumbled silently
over your shy gaze, gentle woman.
And nothing was straight, or simple, or holy
in that afternoon spent downing pints.
After the massacre, the nearby seconds slowly
rotted through hours that were fat, thick, alive.
It Was Crushed Music
It was crushed music
running down the ankles.
It was vast indifference
that scaffolded my heart.
It was a gaze through sleep
like through an iron ring.
elegantly helps undress
snakes of their skins
and stones of themselves.
The wine was pretty good,
the death agreeable,
as one after another, celebrated
skiers plunged through the air,
spraying me with snow.
I’m So Tired I Can’t Go On, He Said
I’m so tired I can’t go on, he said,
standing like a veiled wave . . .
eye, O iris, iris-eyed
proffer a truthful gaze.
You hit my chest with sightless
wine from your goblets spilled,
which I now drink, and while I do
I am drenched but unsullied.
And you beat me with
Saturn’s falling vine,
the thick tail of a comet snuffed
when it and thought entwined.
While my frozen skull turns white
around the eyes it hasn’t got,
from one to ten
the bears eat ice and grow thin
with the polar desperation
of “haves” and “have nots.”
Brusque Speech
What happened to those amazing guys
from after the war?
High school students who visited society women
and even spoke French
with a decent European accent?
One or another of them would print a little book
of poems
on his own dime, or by subscription,
and we, the students,
would read it melting with admiration, un-understanding
the un-understandable . . .
Where are those young men
dressed in melancholy, in the image of distinction
framed by our wide eyes
and oval eyelids?
Where are you, eighth-grade
homeroom teacher,
whose effeminate nose still guards the smell
of a very young man, just shaved?
Lord, what pure days, Lord
what respect would fit within
our boyish talk
our breaking voices.
What happened to those amazing guys
from after the war?
Where are you, homeroom teacher
from the eighth grade?
Halerib, Khaa
Halerib, Khiiii . . .
Heoro, loro, oro
don’t understand, Halerib, Khaa
don’t understand, aero, loro, oro . . .
You Leave Your Scent
You leave your scent of milk
like a river in my bed,
I sleep exhausted through the night
a royal sword above my head.
Ha! there is white still in the world
and there is the heavy, livid
tang of thirst, when a certain sleep
runs through the dawns, like liquid.
But the smell, ah, the smell,
precedes you in the air, awake,
when the moon, to harvest valor,
bends its bone until it breaks.
You leave the air with your scent
of metal and woman,
of an insect fired inside the clay
of Chaldean space,
of a future column
from a century unborn,
of the wall charred in a blaze
that once charred Ruth.
And you remind me of a
bitter rain, a brittle cloud,
my sweet antique
of future age.
The Jester and Death
The guide lost his mind in the Špilberk, high up
in the prison;
he plays out the old tortures run amok
assorted bodies thrown here and there
until their livers fell out, in fear.
Through the cold hallways where the ex-dead
become door handles instead
or they complete with their ex-meat
the walls that rust with swords and knives,
the guide lost his mind and ventriloquized
a string of fire from his mouth to ignite
my sense of hearing, sense of sight,
with my horse’s muzzle I feed on hay,
with my stork’s beak I fricassee
the interior, unseen cross.
I peck myself with squawking
hens and calm back down again –
when I traverse the stomach of the guide
like through the sack of great divide.
But the Špilberk dead are not our twins,
they are too old for our cognition.
The newly dead, the newly dead
run over us like sweat,
the guide perceives my sweat-soaked
meninges and licks them.
I leave white. What’s dry inside me growls.
A stone jester at the gate of the prison.
I lean against it. It is and isn’t.
I kiss its cheek. I drink water from its mouth.
Contemplation
Sickly spheres appear, bubbly, livid,
pushing against the night, shoving it aside.
Spools of trees turn wet, turn to liquid
and flow, so bitter, to the other side.
Let’s sit on benches in the damp
and watch the Prodigal Son return,
I know him by his sound and shape
and the way the nocturnal birds
fall dead above him
and by the cold of amphibians
that snake around my heels,
my ankles, my tibias . . .
Pulse
Everything you saw froze so quickly
the lake and all that leapt
from its banks, and the comet
froze like a skier mid-jump.
Then it melted so quickly,
it would have been natural
for you to drown in the depths
like fish on gravel.
You just had to know to swim
and then to skate on the ice,
then swim, then skate,
for a moment – a day, a month – a life.
Law
Because I imagine it
he told me:
law means having two hands
two hands with five fingers
each,
law means having two
feet
with five toes each
I sit among green branches
and imagine this
law, law means having
two hands
with five fingers each
law means having two
feet
with five toes each
Law means having a skull
with two eyes, two ears
two nostrils
two eyebrows, two
pairs of separations
He told me, because
I imagine
you have a head, two hands, two feet
Night falls and shadow falls
You lie down, but you won’t for long
you have to be because you were
He told me: get up
walk around.
Ode to Joy
Come you, soul’s grandeur
released from memory and the flight of guardian angels
always whooshing over you with wings
of calm, as though the world
were made of stained silk, and maternal hands
ripped it, slowly, out of spite.
Come grandeur and say:
I was just like him,
my nerves experienced the same vernal green,
I wrapped myself in the same horizon;
the plain of aloneness.
Everyone thought I was him, even me,
because of the sole sky
where the sun and moon beat
over us.
I went ahead of him, I went
behind,
I floated over him, or I was the road
and let his footsteps kiss me, over and over,
until everyone thought I was him,
even I thought I was him
because of the gift of death, something that
endowed us both.
When they stuck their split tongues out to whistle
words with seven heads,
biting and poisoning us, and we
had the same torn ear and the same bloodstains,
we colored diabolic syllables, –
I thought I was him, and everyone
thought I was him,
and only he knew
which body exactly he was in.
But only he really died,
only he knew that it was he,
but I did nothing but turn
my wrath a moment toward myself,
so law could pass in peace
and mystery could pass unmolested.
No earlier, no later.
Undeciphered Inscription
The river flowed by quickly, even though
it was there alone, all the time.
Being there, it flowed
and carried being and everything, thus