A sound is lying between my sight and my hearing,
mornings strung astray,
noisy, lonely streets, indescribable,
only posters ― whole or torn
of some extraordinary concerts, long forgotten ―
in which lustre of the world? ―
autumn has come over the botanical garden,
her trellises have forgotten to support any leaves,
she is singing herself to me in my eyes
in one poem.
Diligent, my heart surrenders to an elegy
like that thought descending from Rainer Maria Rilke.

Gellu Dorian, from *It might take me years

I must confess to you that the death problem
made us sweat:
Our old school teacher,
Miss Barnovski,
whom we used to call the Duchess,
set us two enigmas — you and I.
She wrote on the blackboard — it was a splendid autumn
afternoon —
the radical of you plus the radical of I
is zero, and got out of the classroom
leaving us alone with our queerest thoughts.

Nichita Danilov, from *It might take me years

I meant to write another poem
but time's corkscrew drills
the ribcage
my dreams are acid
the thought - a decayed staircase
don't know what I want to say
Future seems a forgotten poem
gravitation is not a joke inside the bones
I should have learnt to respect you,
death