No one needs to answer to eternity
not beings – lovers or birds
nor things
nor even the elements linked in dark conspiracy
No need to have stopped just there
set down time’s suitcase
(someone once wrote: shaking the dust from his shoes)
to stretch toward what in you always escapes you
but find shelter in blood
salvation will not come from anywhere
but the counted passage of hours
beings and things would pass by like green water between
           riverbanks

lush with grass
or clouds at the edge of a storm
salvation will not come from elsewhere
at the cathedral’s base so many shadows flutter
mortals waiting or wandering
they were the ones you followed down narrow lanes
transfixed by desire
they were carrying time’s suitcase
what law impelled them forward and circling
if not the endless cycle of the seasons?
Finally they broke the spell
perhaps they’ll lead their gangs again between the Rhine and the
    Moselle
saviours of sacks and string
swallows swirled with hawks at the storm’s edge
they sketched your fate

by Emmanuel Moses, from  Preludes and Fugues, translated by Marilyn Hacker

these are still beautiful days to feel alive
despite the fragility of our thoughts, our tissues, our tears
the totalizing concepts swallowing the real
despite meetings without mirror, a strategy of the invisible
despite the decay of atoms inside walls, steps and apples
despite the accident of the imagination that we are
the excess of life, undigestible
despite the depth colliding with the surface of things
despite a pain without meaning, a dream without a dreamer,
a torment without memory
I look at things with crystallizing eyes
despite the limit of the impossible

what dares disturb the illusion of hours without strife,
without venom, without height
the air is full of anice, things ocupy their prescribed places
in this compulsory life
when I was falling they said it wouldn't hurt
but my dreams were forbidden summers,
my hands were cracked by smiling
the energy of the verb to be intense while
I fell into this dialect of silence,
me and the  ghostly caress of a lonely woman

there in the land of the wind
the grass would like to be as tall as you
the salt of the earth would be ringing,
resonant with the laughter of tears
perhaps everything we are
has to conceive a symbolic death
to deliver ourselves

in the embryo of words there is
such a gentleness, a true prophecy:
language would begin to forget itself
we meet in this language without words
like two beings from the end of the world

The poet cannot talk about what he already knows.
Northrop Frye

light splits the world in seen and unseen
night accelerates some fascination
I contemplate the poverty of words
who is doing the autopsy of freedom or something,
a requiem for a country that torments its name
streets don't smell of winter but of loneliness and oblivion, exhaustion and rage
some have already forgotten the meaning of blood
we like sweating not weeping, cursing not dreaming, finding the stain not the brain of fog
we practice forgetting like the snake charmers

dreams look like second hand stores, like the promise of the apocalypse,  a local version of Munch's scream, like an uninvented wheel or the beginning of the world.
an old lady sells fir wreaths in disbelief
too many drugstores ignore the untethered soul,  
a place of redemption they are, unwittingly

here there are poets, there are beasts, gentle souls and blind alleys,
indifferent smiles and lazy hands
and who can hear/bear the echo of that song... better dead than communists, comrades
province hates the center, the center forgets its north,
the all good sequestred against the all bad, no dialectics in doublespeak
truth to be told, there is  no consent for telling the truth
ersatz emotions exchanged casually, Hell is other people. always.  some play Russian roulette with reality, we are the heirs of a history disorder
if my dreams are full of birds, waters, lonesome deposits of the flow of time, I have to wonder
is history a desire machine searching for some mythical proportions

this country or a ****** mother with indifferent hands
here citizens have no faces, but interrupted gestures, fractured thoughts without containment
I fear those who cannot cry
without the meaning of blood history has no meaning or maybe it does, look at the speed of some digital thoughts,  the attack of ready made ideas. ideology becomes eulogy

no wonder I don't know how to end this poem
we need new words that contain their power
what is freedom? who knows, who cares.
oh, an old adagio, a gangrene of our undiscovered minds

I wear my nails like a mischief
but I ask them deep questions
spring comes in the middle of winter without innuendo,
no twist of words just plain daylight
I smile at everything that smiles back at me
I listen to this ancient heart
I contemplate the transgressor in me
then I move on to stand up comedy
(life could be unbearable without laughter)
I conjure words to write themselves
especially when I feel there is too much of an I,
or like a snowdrop in January

I am unknown to myself
when I look for a silhouette or
your stroboscopic touch
the canon of your steps full of woe
an infinitive phrase your timeless smile
silence has its alchemy
poetry finds me like a sacrificial song
being ourselves is enough
nothing more nothing less
the radiance of time a promise
who will be the woman dying one final death
is a stranger to me.
sing to me with the voice of morning
you, woes of laughter spirit