shh, let me tell you how this story goes in this silence as powerful as the one after the first atomic bomb, in this space of crushed illusions. you are alone, I know you are. that was counter therapeutic, that lack of hope when grandma struggled with the shovel against the frozen earth so early in the morning. it was besides the point that grandpa from the other chapter was playing violin outside, on the porch of this house of tears while a childlike woman swallowed the sunset in her frightened eyes. like the opposite of a hermit.
shh, there can be so little love, you know, only broken petty gestures, meaningless in any direction the wind would blow. yes, it’s no good to make love in the quietness of lavender fields. too many mothers have turned on the other side in their slumber sheets.
you know it’s been years since words are tempting to surface the horizon of events, it’s pure physics. something will remain  forever hidden behind the horizon, they say, who count the miracles of day. shh let’s not disturb now the other chambers of thought, I'll write to you each day like a child forgotten outside to play.
they are coming inside, I’ll put you somewhere in the preformed space, I’ll cram you somewhere into the smallest place. see you in the morning with the first breath.  you have to do this alone, redefining these tears, no one will do it for you.
our bodies link us together, do they know? I’ll just keep writing to you. mothers and daughters are bonded by scarfs when fathers just look aside. you are a wall breaker, this is what you are. the world cannot bear metaphors when dawn gets stifled by false pretence. I’ll feed you with words as long as necessary, till the air becomes more clear in the morning. some things can be born only by whispers.

smaller than the table, smaller than the chair,
smaller than my father’s big boots.
like a potato, that is how small I dreamt myself.
because in spring, they put the potatoes
in the ground and that was it,
till autumn they were not disturbed any more.

I dreamt myself in the planting pocket, among them,
sleeping sweetly in the darkness,
turning on either side in summer
and then falling asleep again.

and to wake up in autumn still sleepless
and unclean like my brothers
and when it is time to dig us up, to jump above
and yell: stop digging, stop digging,
for I shall willingly come home,
if you put me back in spring,
and in spring I am the first one
to be thrown back in the planting pocket
and so on, to always stay and sleep,
from the planting pocket to the basement and from the basement to the planting pocket,
for many years, deeply asleep and forgotten.

Ioan Es. Pop
translated by Beatrice Ahmad

It might take me years
To dislodge myself from
Life – this magma which has swallowed me,
And be out of the reach of neighbour gossip.
To emerge from a fight not mine.
You were there, privileged angel in the dark,
Amused at my faux ferocity,
Recalling the courage of my first days,
When I was unconcerned about
What place I’d fall asleep in.
Not yet understanding
The human need to cling to a past.
Always ready to give myself away.

You watched from above
The prose of my struggles,
In the web of our common suffocation.
You knew how to be the cruel one,
To leave everything behind, in a town to which
You would never return.
Today I fear the drizzle,
I fear the fog.
I never forget my umbrella at home.
I mind the hustle of the quay,
Unusual at this early hour.
I cherish the noises which accompany my coffee on the terrace.
I watch helplessly, in exasperation,
These faces of common poems
Which harbours always hold.

Constantin Abaluta, from *It Might Take Me Years

This hospital has a room

for weeping. It has no crèche.
No canteen. No washroom queue.

Only this queue for weeping.
No lost property booth. No

complaints department. Or
reception. No office of second

opinion. Of second chances. Its sons
and daughters die with surprise

in their faces. But mothers
must not cry before them. There is

a room for weeping. How hard
the staff are trying. Sometimes

they use the room themselves. They
must hose it out each evening.

The State is watching. They made
this room for weeping. No remission ―

no quick fixes. A father wonders
if his boy is sleeping. A mother

rakes her soul for healing. Neighbours
in the corridor ― one is screaming

It moved from your child to mine.
More come. Until the linoleum

blurs with tears and the walls
are heaving. Until the place can’t

catch its breath ― sour breath
of pine. And at its heart

this room.

Mario Petrucci, from *Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl

“sometimes I get nervous
when I see an open door”*

not really in the mood for this
“who are you?”, I was asked
and the prolonged tears suddenly receded from language
shoulders, heels, nails looking for something closer to the happiness of sunken ships or whatever
my antishoulder, antiheel hurts
when you take my face into your hands
to drag my eyes into your cries
it’s just you and me now mother
let’s face it
your dying is my breath
my joy your death bed
temptation your authority
into the cemetery of numb disillusions
you wouldn’t let go of the death of words
you keep your sleeping pills for good
on empty shelves

I’ll stay in the doorway
to watch my birth
catching up with myself

let me tell you stories about stories
let me touch you with the pure joy of touching,
the eclipse of emptiness or
spicy details on the trajectory of sight

some sorrows make for an obsession without identity

we can invent a sign language
for nobody else to understand
this unfinished text, the singularity of clarity,
the sweetness of fingers

no shame in shade
let me touch you with a heresy
haunted by silence

I listened only to voices of pervasive enduring loneliness today.  that's right, no point in altering it through symbolic transformation, the metaphor has its decency. no wonder i found this place where silence has infinite nuances like a love slipping through your fingers, like a time obliterating the intensity of the systolic wind. I thought about writing a letter of intent to the world just to say No! (after much yes, a no is vital). No, i don't want to understand, i don't wanna know,  don't wanna shed tears, read books about the meaning of violence, dream war, fear devastation. if you zoom in more and more you can catch history repeating its fractals. the more you look the more you might feel the ******* of pain. somebody asked : do you tantra today? No! today let only this particular silence be

let me listen to you
your hidden landscapes
your lives lost
in velvety oblivion

listen to the streams of blood
throbbing at your wrist
in the tender flesh inside your elbow

listen to the vulnerable intensity
in the soft vale at your collarbone

the silence on your lips
the whirls below

listen
listen through you
to these things that one cannot speak

**Ioana Ieronim

"Ah! descendons
Ensemble!"*

suddenly the night moved
and I woke up to see him
sitting there in the steamy windows
with his powerless hands

his soul was flickering
screaming inside in every
possible way
his hands had done too much
if only he hadn't desired such
till she told him:
"you are filth
you make me sick
you are a disgrace!!!"

"you are the very fiend",
said the liquor
"I'll **** them all,
I'll **** this turbid full,
I am the devil himself",
said the grin

I saw him in the doorway
leaving behind his empty chairs
he would have strangled her perhaps
next he was lying there
like a pile of rags

"What do I have to lose?"
his death was as respectable
as the one of a king
in a Shakespeare play
it was a double ******
and a suicide
then there was this bond
mother and daughter
had lost their hands
trying  or perhaps failing
to hold

there is such lightness in this
-impossible words-
going back to the unknown
into the ancient sparkle of desire
into the restlessness of oblivion
I woke up and there were some whispers
while I was listening to dawn
or maybe I was finally falling asleep in myself:
when laughter and tears come
just let them be
there is no right or wrong
in eternity

the flesh of words heavy since
we no longer speak the same language
yes is no no is maybe maybe is later
later is tomorrow tomorrow is never
one can only run away from pain only
towards more pain
only the words are sad my heart no longer
a wounded totem
my fingertips have always had their dreamy way
in truth love touches you daily with the most prosaic sway

no signs no omens no nothing
just a sudden harmony in the noise of time
I was not even watching the speed of darkness
but making pancakes while not thinking that
when he smiles I'm in big trouble
in fine, this nameless connection this loving
togetherness of everything this God
who keeps imagining the world as if it does not know it
appeared in my fragile form,  fascinans et tremendum
a vision of a fluctuating infinity with so alive the dying
and life just continued breathing, the pancakes were ready
my inbox full of invitations to cure, illumination, mindfulness,
more connection, more healing for trauma, let's become wiser, deeper, more relaxed, more aligned with the soul of the world
so, I agree but in the meantime only the mystery got deeper

"I don't care if I don't look pretty
Big girls cry when their hearts are breaking"*

They wouldn’t let me cry, they could have felt the tender lies decomposing.  But this pain knows nothing of the theft of day, of how lemon tastes for you, of predicaments of truth.( The arrow of meaning goes backwards and forwards when it doesn’t get stuck.) Silence is nailed against every word. This old story: they are speaking in the corners: look at her. But this is not a poetic novela if you care to know, only misery exposed. This vital flaw of violins, of not being composed.  Not everybody knows to transmute pain into a bridge of light. Like Jarrett did. This pain doesn’t need words, images, metaphors, brutal as it is, like a mating season. The echo rests in stone.  This pain is a wall breaker. The taboo of words. I won’t say more. I would let myself live inside this large momentum, this much I can save for today. The magnitude of tears takes me there, so close to the one I love.

"no distance
for your words

a breath a voice a presence a force
coming straight
reassured

touching my nakedness
under my clothes"

**Ioana Ieronim

I didn’t know you were here to stay... you’ve found a place to rest inside this chest. there is no one there, on the other side. why can I measure my life in pain-years?  I am going to listen to the weight of your step... we are so many... poor bodies with slaughtered desires. life lifts up gently like hypnotic steam from raw bodies while you growl inside my bones. you have thorns of truth and short sentences: “papa doesn’t love me”, “mama keeps cursing”, “I am useless”. you are the only thing alive since I insist to lay down in my mother womb over and over again. have me expelled, have me covered in a blanket of blood so that I do not see the future.  you keep giving birth to my selves.
stop looking at me with charcoal eyes, father
look, mother, you can have me silenced for the beauty of dawn

“To live is to be slowly born.”*

that day
time reversed its memories
the interior waters were protected
the autumn fruits were quiet
in their sweetness
some joy was scudding by
leaving shy traces on the cheeks of the city

who called you?
not my screams
they were trapped in someone else’s
purposes
fear, indifference, emptiness, hate
were in the middle

you  were a passionate thief of glances
there had been many before
each time blood rushed inwards
you had a secret collection of lost heads

suddenly it started
my right hand started
to strip you of your dreams
my right ear kept the pace
in the colorful space
I didn’t mean to pry
into the tension of your jaw
saying “I am”
(thinking real hard)
into your frowning with your lips
and the intense split growing in the middle
pushing you and yourself apart
the uncertainty of your feet
ready to take off

it is fear
dissolving my presence
my skin stopped recognizing myself
every inch has a voice
I was disarmed
I descended into yourself
and you offered to me
my own mystery

Picasso was watching over our shoulders
to Degas’ ballerinas
hinting at the lack of faith
in your smile
-there are so many spaces
filled with non-sense,
I know-

I turned into a landscape of desire
with perfumed weeds
there was an ocean of eyes
between us
wonderful images rolled over my skin
what was your chest crushing?

to be or not to be engulfed
still a lottery
our preoedipal mothers were pointing
their fingers at the horizon
pain turning into more pain
turning into hate turning
into hope
this heaviness in the middle
their laughter and innuendo
heavy as a tomb stone

that day never came
when you had me
without hello
no theory convinced me
to understand
this centering love I feel
every time your smile
happens to me

dreamers never say
“I’m sorry”
just leave me there
I'll be consumed
one day

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them -

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided -
and that one wears an orange blight -
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away -
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled -
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing -
that the light is everything - that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading.  And I do.

A gale
stripped all the leaves from the trees last night
except from one leaf
left
to sway solo on a naked branch.

With this example
Violence demonstrates
that yes of course -
it likes its little joke from time to time.

Wislawa Szymborska from *Here New Poems

When the hand which writes takes a rest
it seems to me demonically transparent;
beneath its skin, veins like a few plants
in a fishbowl — and the blood
flows within and floods
the silence; its murmur through time
the unlived life of the ancestors
rushing into the light of my eyes.

Dumitru Chioaru, from *It Might Take Me Years

“I don’t like future, mama
“I don’t wanna go there
I like when past comes
cause I can fix things”
sometimes  words desire such
and time just follows desire anywhere
Where love is, there will time go
into a past without future
to set absence on a naive fire
to light the windows
to dive into the thick air of yesterday
without breathing out
or rushing into a dream
of a future without past
without shadow
without doubt

while past and future
simply exist  in the same time
undisturbed by paradoxes
in this fluid larger than us
of single moment within the moment
in the present tense
of love

tonight I’m calling fearful souls
the peers of my tribe
there is chaos in the heart of stones we are casting
there is a lot of pain in unborn desires
we are trembling, we are holding our breath –
what does it mean to feel safe
we are dreaming and waiting
old mothers are screaming unheard
the tyrant is playing backgammon with God

I am searching for each of you in the safety of dawn
the beast with bottomless eyes is here
Inside
so difficult to grasp our soul
to endure this: a world of faceless people
we cover our eyes, mouth, hearts
bottomless eyes are smearing

the body as a battlefield
oh, we remember what we want to have forgotten
we collapse under the burden of our own fragility
the history repeats itself shutting down stories
so many stories of cancelled love

the slaughterhouse soul is too heavy
and I can’t remember the ancient joy and innocence
the simplicity of being
words have just exploded
and my heart is cracked open

and now I am afraid even of my words
of that which should not be named
the murderer of soul, dignity and poetry

I am afraid of staring into bottomless eyes
without my peers
without my tribe

Stasis, but
              without death
out of the flower, fruit
grows deliberately
you shroud your hearing with
              the rustle
of the poplar practiced at being
               alone

fog like thinly sifting
              sand
hills rolling round and round
               as in a plasma
your other face which, in your departure,
                you forget

the woodpecker
pecks at the house
     of the ancient children

Aura Musat
*translated by Adam J Sorkin and Alexandru Pascu

something must have happened
many times on my lips
further away into the liquid world
before the world
and on my knees full of devotion
I'm laughing a lot more nowadays
no longer baffled at the sun's *****
"seduction is the mother of wisdom" -
said the poetess
combing her hair with precise movements -
I drag my amniotic desires on to every door
I see
I'm recklessly alluding to my lover
with thick eyebrows
or to how to turn the light off
I am no longer covered with skin
when the lightest of waters dreams
between the yearning and the scream

I'll watch the birds wane tonight
tomorrow perhaps

we are left here
enchanted but unable
so disabled to
recognize
the wormholes
this paradox
is it the most misterious
they don't say
but
the moment
I become
words
I die in all letters
at once
I dissapear from
the impossibility
of prethought
curved into a field of longing
most inner of language
so the moment
my words enrage you
bemuse you
or make you wanna run
I am alive again
in your coffe
or in a jacaranda
far away

life is a beautiful mess
everybody is afraid
to say
wholeness an antiword,
they don't mind,
the mastery
of a waking U
so poetry
is reality
in a language
we don't understand

what becomes of me
we will see

blue insomnia have woken up in my words
seeds of wind, the lament of unknown men, women
the impossible alphabet of terror
daily I pass by the same cemetery
the willow-trees have new leaves now
the words can' swerve while
their faces dissolve slowly deeper and deeper into death
and I’m holding mine into hands smeared with tears

he  loved me like
they loved their neck rope

we see through the night
what we can
empty jars
purple lies
hardly the collection of killings
that makes
the morning sing

death has no words

this light carries a secret desire
to bring the horizon nearer
to bear more hearts
more screams
the violence of breaking barriers
invisible forces of cohesion of dismantling
are playing in the innocence of an unborn language

their gestures interrupted by thoughts escaping tired bodies
their gestures flow into strange voices
to be is something
to be loved is everything
to love is still a mystery
how to hold on to your heart
as to wild horses

I can feel you at the end of thoughts  tonight
as I dance the forgotten rituals of touch
I  wanna be your perfect stranger till
the trance of darkness flickers
in your bottomless eyes

Right here - one small step away -
right now - the moment that this has added
itself to and became the past -
I heard myself calling me from all that follows

stretch my hand out as I may
the horizon comes no nearer to making sense -
but if I answer it is likely someone else
will answer back beside an echo

my eyes are tired of dreaming -
it's like a bird thirst when it flies over the sea -
they crash into reality
if I could only put myself out
in the man I ought to be

Ioanid Romanescu, from Orpheus
translated by Stavros Deligiorgis

the light is raging, colours are hiding
when we hide our hearts full of dusk
we are mercenaries of ensoulment
listening to this manic-depressive couple,
power and helplessness, makes one wanna scream:
darkness is vulnerable too
clockwise the mind in action flows looking for its anti-time,
our actions can stand as tall us
anticlockwise is a flow into the trance of the unknown
into foreign bodies full of the tension of keeping the light
apart from day

Magritte is dreaming his hat, Freud his pipe
The Empire of Light perhaps
Ceci est une pipe, a vital voyeurism, the pleasure of stirring up
so many levels to listen for their hidden symbols
we are antiparticles for each other, when we collide reality starts screaming for each soul to witness
but a homeless pain possesses our dreams
unable to recognize the ******* of caring

too tired for rage, I am only wondering
where to find the necessary love for this fiery world
I ask the trees, the birds, the mind of the wind,
I'll pray for them to teach me their grace

the women burn
their solitude in desolate pans
their underwear smells of blind hands
of running in the sun
of death a little
a moment of silence are wearing
between the legs
these women with still ****** hips
and the maniac blood slowly ascends
into nakedness

all they need is
faith

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

By Jalaluddin Rumi

the walls have ears, they used to say
these walls are full of screams of declamation
of a burning stream of bodies with parfumed names
love confused diffused in this internal flight
being chased while chasing unrecognizable the face of truth for now
the warmness the softness of bodies so promising so alluring
the illusion, a fleeting connection so powerful that there is no one
to guard the depth of this edge, me and the anti-me
this disconnection sings lullabies to my zest for life
the right vision comes to those who wait
it is unbearable at first, cause you are not used to your
eyes seeing through the water, let alone the abyssal depth of blood

this could be a poem I could have written if I were you but
the most strange of it all is that I am this you and the other you
luckily the light is untraslatable and you can see it too

a wild god is sleeping in your bones
it is too early to tell the direction
of that thought, you know
it has a dark end
no need for an algorithm
for wonder

wild images colonize my brain
they throw me here and there
it's not too late under the roof of the world
not for a bleaching heart

something is growing like a wave
that forgot its end

that moment
as fragile as a snowflake
when I slip into another's poem
and something inside twinkles
like a firefly full of wonder

"Be the bliss of my trembling
like a tree’s leaves:
give a name, give a beautiful name
a pillow to this disintegration."
— János Pilinszky

I feel like a poet again as
I'm standing in front of this window
it is full of ivy and ripples of quietness
life has certain rhymes and some riddles
I'm thinking about lovers exchanging
spontaneous glances, words, illusions
I'm thinking about social workers
returning home with a tired smile
I'm thinking about young and old
carrying different worlds under their skin

I feel like a poet again as I wait for the hours
to ripen for more truth to tell
a round whiteness  an exultant blackness
embrace the window

In this vulnerable, resting, sunset light
the eye is thickened with shadow, deepened by absence.
Things hang in space, ground down by being seen, transparent —
and the mode they exist in now
is their mode of fading away.

The creating eye has weakened;
and the world that streamed — is almost already all sea;
whoever’s in front of me, behind me, at my side —
is me, but isn’t here.
And it’s already late. And the day’s over.
And we were left here, alone.

On the banks of the world
there we sat down, imploring our souls —
There we weep, eyeless,
when our gaze sinks into the great sea
and we suddenly remember
who we have been.

Amir Or, from *Let's speak you

we knock on the doors for them to open, to
let us out, but those on the other side don't hear us and
they too knock on the doors for us to open and let them out
and when they open it's ourselves we bump into
but we don't pay attention to ourselves and we say we want out
and they say we want in, don't take the door away with you,
we wouldn't have anything to open on the way out,
there would remain a blank spot in the wall,
we won't find any way to get out.

Ioan Es. Pop**, from *the livid worlds

Dear E. S.
poetry
is the world the human race
my own life
all flowered from the word
the transparent wonder
of a delirious ferment

When I find
one single word
in this my silence
it is hewn into my life
like an abyss

Giuseppe Ungaretti

too much outside too little inside
everything there loud and noisy
in the stream of energy
every single cell an orchestra,
a blazing furnace
recycling the unseen
what to choose slipping
from a dream to the same dream
possibility after plausibility
with the insatisfaction of a night
unable to decipher the tales of the moon
one needs true silence to hear
the meaning of music
don't let go of the wisdom of stones
every fragment knows there is something
wiser, a finite infinite semiosis

the clockwork reversed
time is joking
some plastic smiles
some scattered dreams
and the growing pains
bending us beneath the horizon
here it is
written in my yesterdays
i wouldn't have loved you
differently
next day

with my childlike defenses
holding together
the shape of the world
inside a bubble
a phantasmatic place
or just a drama
(for mama)
here i am anyway

and the world without us
here it is

why aren’t you tired? of changing clothes, make-up, ribs to torment? sometimes when the night stops screaming I feel you like a blind ribbon stumbling our feet, like nervous fists trying in vain to retain some lilac perfume. I used to pray for my knees crushed by gravitational tales, for my ragged heart forcing the tympanum of time

we try to smile and hold hands we dissolve our tears into thunder until the rain stops breathing.

the end gets harsh. many of you
now fall pray to doubt.
nobody forces anybody, but somebody,
nevertheless, must give the orders.

the acids have grown lazy and fat.
something more cruel than they are must be found.
if you give up now, if you do it now of all times,
neither the tomb nor the sky will cover you sufficiently.

you are the possessors of the alternative and this is
the only one. that's why i've talked to you about her
in so many ways.
the little that is about to disappear lies now
only in you and in your power.

a black shell pulls to the shore.
i didn't say that everybody is climbing aboard.
but the quiet fright with which we work on the stars
will stop them from falling for a while.

Ioan Es. Pop**, from *the livid worlds

you wear my skin as a coat
in the morning light
storehouses of tears
bridge my thoughts
of you
what is this je ne sais pas
biology, art artefact,
genocide of reason?
politics of satisfaction?
yes and no and maybe:
life playing a vitality game
with itself

there is a cosmic spin for
unborn thoughts, gestures,
meanings.
a house full of empty things,
the past. for non-believers.
****** traces on my skin
left by the wind, the sea, the fields
a tapestry of dread cause silence
was a cathartic violence

sit next to me and we'll watch
the elusive rhythm of gravity
pulling our cells in the same direction
to a new species of desire
unabridged

you, an event on my retina
an accident of time colliding with itself
my hands have pulse on your t-shirt
everything in its place like a silence
waiting to happen
the speed of smile measured in light-seconds
this body is a house of metaphors
a space for living words forgetting my name

today is a bitter day
words are broken windows
poetry refuses itself

people turn their faces from each other
no crossroads for the wounded
looking for their bodies full of warmth
I am alone with my fragile heart
too many objects of perpendicular desire
and no purpose intrinsic to our birth

it's a normal day
some are sharpening their minds
dress up their desire
to use me

today is just another day
the world is devouring its fragments
in the quietness
of hearts

this pain like an unwritten poem
only the winter knows how much I loved you
how little I am able to say
the air is tall, the night so deep
I walk in the selfishness of the cold
I walk in this landscape where love is an exile,
a forest without shadows, a party without guests
a happiness without an alibi
something that gets destroyed at the first burst of light
but springs again from the unknown depth of skin

I am in the waiting room of a dying love, a nascent love
while Monalisa is sleeping without dreams
in the depth of my days the certainty of tears
only the winter knows how much I loved you

wait

wait
you say
don’t late this day
let it early
away

never

when all my roads
are closing down
you take me to this
never
town

open

you kicked a door open
in my mind
before
your
more

soul

soul is a ball of fire
enclosing memories
which do not
want
to lose the body
they hire

hug

this tired day
at the corner of age
hugging your words
floating in that air
that mediterranean
that balcony over the waves
that
you

Lidia Vianu**, from *My Cup of Light

Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

-Diamond Sutra, ca. fourth century CE

(I have to feel this in any language)
to keep the horizon distant in your eager hands
to carefully listen to the rustling of time
to erase the shame from silent kisses
to put your violence in the courage
to be less than anyone have thought/pointed/dreamed
to preserve some hope in between the shoulders
for somebody to lean against
a symmetric desire

what if it's what he wanted?

Like this stone
of Monte San Michele
as cold as this
as hard as this
as dried as this
as stubborn as this
as utterly
dispirited as this

Like this stone
is my unseen
weeping

Death
we discount
by living

Giuseppe Ungaretti, 1916

mama told me:
minodora, stop thinking about sam
when you go to the market
think of bacon, think of cabbage
be a proper woman
what would have been, i asked her
if beethoven hadn’t always had a bird
singing in his head?
yeah but beethoven, mama said
picking up the dust rag
and starting to clean the genius’s ears
and that’s only because i must
write about you
the same way i must sneeze
or yawn
i dreamt of you last night
you had a baby with a cat’s head
he was cute as a button
you were screaming your head off
‘come see what a tumbling rock
has to go through to reach a beautiful stillness’
it’s a big deal
when you forget to cross yourself
before going to sleep

Nora Iuga translated by Diana Manole and Adam Sorkin