Night is an old blanket
asleep on my pillow.
Night is the mist on the river
covering the willows.
Night is the moon turning blue
brushing her hair.
Night is a black dress
on the back of my chair.

"Like a black leukemia of stars"
my soul turns in on itself
far more lonely, far more sickly in spirit.

Above, the same desolate landscape
of your dark isolation,
and below - blacker landscapes of black!

Neither the far-off cry of love
nor the nostalgic come-hither of death
disturbs anything within me any longer.

... And only the relentless light ray of lucidity
stabs through, colder, even colder, without mercy
without doubt, without hope, without even a shiver!

Nichita Danilov
*translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Cristina Cirstea

took all of my belongings
- those words i borrowed
for staging myself -, packed
it all, pinned it a note,
here's to us, if ever,
went for a dock
(no lighthouse please,
the night needs a rest).

As the night unfolds
its quietness,
and distance
is silenced,
and movement
is carpeted
into echoing
rumbles,

a sight unveils
all once blinded
by day light,
by the hazardous
ransom of rush,

and it appears
before me
what lays
within
a trap of sand,
breaking down
the bones of will,
grinding morrow
into the narrowness
of a held back
gesture,

it appears
before me,
naked
like a stillbirth,

my solitude.

ends so ― spiralling after
egg (that other half of our
chains) & setting gills

in gristled knot that buds
legs as tadpoles do & blow-
hole ears halfway down

the back & low-set eye
alien as featherless chick ―
ah we have peered into

that shared **** whose
blasto-flesh runs its gauntlet
of fowl & fish so fused at

the tail nothing can be told
apart ― is this why when i am
late i find in upstairs dark

you ― on placenta duvet &
hunched round self as wom-
bed ones are? ― as though

i had just returned from
all eternity to catch you
naked out sleepwalking

space without even
navel-twisted purpled
rope to hold you

Mario Petrucci, from *i tulips