When I am with you
I wanna lose my center
he would say to you gently
without words

he would translate you into his own language
of groove, longing, shouting, fluid desires
for the sake of  finding his own tracks
his eager mutable depths

he is looking for harbours
for his solitude turned into offerings
for devotion
for the secret wisdom that fills the cracks of night
he doesn't deny the intensity
of the sweet conversations between the hearing
and the touch
he hides his violence in sealed wells,
in clear visions, in the decimals of knowledge

he was a lonely boy
full of wonder

that moment of terrifiying beauty
for which there is no language
only a foam of primordial letters
and the possibility of cosmos

the hours cascading in his veins
it was so natural and shocking:
he was my hidden black whole
(the black whole one thought crosses to another)
and with my bare feet on the blade of the horizon
I was bleeding curses
promises to the unknown
confessions of sublime intensity

the terror of beauty so real
as we danced that mysterious dance
of light turning effortlessly into darkness
of darkness turning effortlessly into
light

it all starts in pieces
maybe I was his morphine
and he was rebelling against
every fragment of unhealed time
in his shoulders.
with him I discovered a new sea of time and
fused with my roots
I rest suspended in the chaos of possibility
to the end of my undreamed dreams
as he was hallucinating my younger selves
anew

we opened the other dimensions of time
descended into flesh
without really knowing
how coherent pain can be
and I could go on and on and on, like the beat
we were only a poem
without destination
but the possibility
of cosmos

silence was improvising in my eyes
in this tender fog between one moment
and this moment
and I could see the old love approaching
to invade me
to intoxicate me
with its hypnotic violence
this love like a fossilized wood in their gaze
came to visit me
again
with so many faces
so many whispers
it was as if angels had descended
on the barren land and
with their unthought hands
were tenderly carressing
the old bones unsung
what else could have I done
than
open my eyes and dream
the palimpsest of forgotten dreams
forged in the greatest intensity
of all the fleeting moments
in which
they blinked

(I need to shelter my heart from
the silence of decaying leaves
from the violence of life destroying
itself)

Steeped in history, building a shadowy bouquet,
Unable to reassemble ourselves as grapes,
We are wound into a richness we cannot undo.
Beautiful still, and with a destiny that is vaguely related to vines—
We still know water and wind.
We know the stories of the keepers of the casks,
We know versions of civilizations that sing.
There is goodness.
A look to a future of solutions is a potion table of bubbling mysteries,
Soaked in folded learnings, lost threads, unseen outcomes.
We are not
And yet
We are grapes always

by Nora Bateson

In my house, the sunlight inhabits all the rooms,
which makes me think that I am someone important.
At the window, I fall into the slumber
of the nonbeing of everything I see.

I have only the sunlight on my face and arms. I am sad,
like a man who never leaves his house,
yet knows we live in a world of stones and trees
and has no use for the hastened moves
we call friendship.

by Constantin Abaluta, from It Might Take Me Years, An Anthology of Poetry

Poetry is the weeping eye
it is the weeping shoulder
the weeping eye of the shoulder
it is the weeping hand
the weeping eye of the hand
it is the weeping soul
the weeping eye of the heel.
Oh, you friends,
poetry is not a tear
it is the weeping itself
the weeping of an uninvented eye
the tear of the eye
of the one who must be beautiful
of the one who must be happy.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

Distance is the cog wheel
on the haunted axle of my hearing,
grinding fine the deadened mind
of that unborn god
waiting to be caught
by the earth's blue speed,
and carrying in a handled urn
the plucked heart - ours,
it's beating, it's heard, it's beating, it's heard,
a sphere in wild growth -
the roads are wet with tears,
memory frail and elastic,
a sling for stones, a gondola
drowned in childlike Venice's,
a tooth yanked from the cells with a string -
down the empty socket of Vesuvius. And you exist.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru