"no distance
for your words

a breath a voice a presence a force
coming straight
reassured

touching my nakedness
under my clothes"

**Ioana Ieronim

"Contentment is a synonym for loneliness, cool loneliness, settling down with cool loneliness. We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength. Usually we have to give up this belief about a billion times, again and again making friends with our jumpiness and dread, doing the same old thing a billion times with awareness. Then without our even noticing, something begins to shift. We can just be lonely with no alternatives, content to be right here with the mood and texture of what’s happening."

"it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions — all our ideas about how things are — keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way… We don’t ultimately know anything. There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness."

"Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior."

by Pema Chodron from "When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advise for Difficult Times"

I want to write a poem about you
and use patches of my skin
instead of nouns
the passion of druids instead of
verbs
All I need is
Radiohead and
space to breath
in
your
breathing

(the body imagines what the mind can't)

An anxious dress
Like a spring crocus:
Violently violet
Inside and outside.

Its cold silk,
Snake-like and pure,
Born, endured
Like a straightjacket

By my hot sinful
Skin.
Both
Smell of myself;

That is, of life
With death inside.
My soul, living bird,
Can you rend them?

Carolina Ilica, from **The Short Poem of My Long Life

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

from  On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978

I have ships in my bones they carry me
somewhere else like a misunderstanding cause
the I of the world carries the evening
over the mountains on misterious ways
a nasty habit the imagination
sometimes I wonder if the ancestors are stalking these walls
to see if we can be happy
against the sacrifice of song
cause we die without thinking about it
a little bit every day from this stride
to put everything in its place
inside

"I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me..."
George Gordon Byron

"The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find)
Is not to act or think beyond mankind:
No powers of body or of soul to share,
But what his Nature and his state can bear."
Alexander Pope

"...body is but a striving to become mind... it is mind in its essence"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"... insight that he in some sort possesses,
A privilege whereby a work of his,
Proceeding from a source of untaught things
Creative and enduring, may become
A power like that of Nature's."
William Wordsworth

"What am I? ?Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought with whom I traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings' dearth."
George Gordon Byron

"Imagination is a Divine Vision not of the World, or of Man, nor from Man as he is a Natural Man, but only as he is a Spiritual Man."
William Wordsworth

"Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woaful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"That awful Power"..."which unites clearness with depth, the plenitude of the sense with the comprehensibility of the understanding".*  * the creative faculty [my note]
S. T. Coleridge

you, yes, you
I need you to feel
more alive
and that's the end
the beginning of
any metaphor

so hard to comprehend if you
can truly be loved as you are
or we simply use each other
like Seurat used light
the jukebox of desire plugged-in
it keeps turning reality against itself

sometimes  I am dreaming, feeling
crying, laughing too much
I know.
I keep looking at the world
with the terror of being alive
with a look that exhausts love
itself

what if contradiction is the mother
of progression?

It is you whom I love today. I love you with all my loves.*
Frida Kahlo

screaming gold and exulting light
I betrayed the sunset today
still life without promises the city
there comes that tone again
in the storehouses of flesh
where life dreams itself
you’ve colonized me
with hate and desire
unstable tempo
my eyes blind
like a storm without wind
I disfigured some light today
its unpretended beauty
no paradox
not even a surprise
I fall for these wounds, your burden
the taste of failure
the panic of not knowing
the trembling of your feet
no need for signifying something
for an ending or a touch
there is love without desire
desire without love
you can call me crazy
if this is all
you can say
at the end of the day

far away seems so close in your eyes
and you push your blood away to
feed the wind or some whispers
unimaginable to the full
my torrid eyes see the sky full of scars
sometimes when
the moon is full of boom
all I feel is you

today
a strange milky light
rolling over the hills
like a blinding blanket
I caressed naked branches
their fragility a statement
plum trees apple trees
peach trees cherry trees
and I a witness
to the dignity with which
they carry their wounds
I love trees because
their shadow is not full
of bitterness.
perhaps
they know how to cry
for the absence of wonder

you see
much is going on
beyond words:
all of me and
this tree
feel
there is a depth
in everything

a visceral transparency possesses me
when I face you ferociously gentle
I almost see, my reflection passes efortlessly
through you, I say my hello, mostly genuine
hello, will you stop me from dream thinking
so cruel to observe the still waters knowing all that I know
almost dreamed I was caressing your lips
almost forget you untouched under the eyelids

no deja vu, busy to catch the bus to mercy street
I almost pass by you on the street with my hands
seeing forward

Speak to me of the wave of longing
That broke against you,
Pressuring your forehead,
Narrowing your narrow street,
Beating on your palms,
                                         America.

Your eyes remain unclosed,
Looking-glass and sea,
For the dream with claws.

Fairy bird,
arching bird,
Sweet enchantress,
Envied by throngs.

"And you who ask about me everywhere,
By now don't you know that I am death?"

Flavia Cosma from Wormwood Wine
translated by Don Wilson with the author

"And the heart is hard to translate"

I rush every sunset in its pit of blood
I hold your absence with my bear hands
As the center of the silence I can give to myself
Some impressions of my thoughts of you
Uncertainties embodied by swords
Are roaming the streets in my place
The mirrors chased me away
They refuse to deepen the light
Refuse the clarity of a day
When I am a simple woman
When you are a simple man
I have to prepare my escape routes
Since your fingers smell of apples
The air is full of chemicals
And I stare at the intoxicating hope
My curses explode in hourglasses
There must be a misunderstanding
why did I promise to myself
my heart,
your hell,
our dance,
the resurrection
of naivety
in this body?

perhaps there is no doubt:
I can only love you
       or
I can love only you


and no
yet
but
(shh, oh, my foolish heart!)

Desire of your hands bright
in the penumbra of fire:
they knew of oak-trees, roses,
death. Ancient winter.

The birds searched for seed,
and were suddenly snow;
so, the word.
A little sun, an angelic halo,
and then the mist; and trees,
and we making dawn from the air.

**Salvatore Quasimodo

silence melts like caramel inside
like an empty-full touch
words travel without meaning
the city indulges its narcosis
all the dumping fights,
jouissance de vivre on the move
and he wants someone
to fill in the blanks:
oh, this is my skin

he carries his cotton touch
on forgotten routes
to vibrant roots
identities combine & depart
some are searching for new pronouns
the silence of silences rejuvenates the city
fresh dreams
new transactions
between truth and reality

and he wants -
fill himself in
and some wonder

so long  so painful this journey
to surrender myself anew like a bud full of tension
recognize you, reinvent the rituals of sensing
I weep in front of the threshold of spring  
between eros and thanatos an excessive tenderness
I am well prepaired for the erosion of time in my hair
poetry and reality facing each other in my hands
I do not hope do not despair do not wait for grapes to wonder
it's just the taste of it,  the feel of it, this quality of the infinite
that makes me look at you with androgynous complicity

so-in-time-so-inside or
as inside so in time
the plasma of thoughts far away
there in the spaces without meaning
the sprouts of faceless darkness
and systoles without time
I step from one silence into the other
and unshaped my body sings
I am babysitting my heart while the light loses its weight
on my shoulder
time is a pocket and I can hear only my blood

the luxury of mending this piece with that one
I am so complete when I am my feet
sometimes I don’t need a name
no need for one way roads
when quietly the dark sprouts me
and the days pass
without complaining

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.

It's possible to look on the world
through:
the magnifying glasses of wonder
the diminishing glasses of despair
through fingers, through tears
the black-, the blue-, and rose-coloured spectacles
through a keyhole
the piece of glass for observation of sun-eclipse
the barrel of a rifle
and through thousand hollow-glasses
of the Auschwitz-Museum.

by. Henryk Jasiczek translated from the Polish by Adam A. Zych

time creeps between waves and broken seashells
the trance of a hunter, the soul of a shipwreck, the indifference of naked bodies in the sun possess my heart
the force of the sea rises inside the eyelids
everywhere you look a cinematic aloneness
the wisdom of sand in a fish' dream
now and then two embraced shadows,
the ardour of water consuming the beach

she is so brave so daring
so quiet so earnest
holding the void of pain
for so long
in sleepless nights
she used to wildly dance
her unmuted dreams
such gentle spirit nests
in her heart
that the days count themselves
till darkness subsides
and laughter reinvents itself

her fierce heart is such a gift
the shape of miracle
in my tears
each day

as long as it's night here
over there it will be morning

great things will be said tomorrow,
but not as great as for the world
not to remain the same.

you brought keys bigger than the doors
that must be opened.
there is so much noise behind, on the corridors,
and how little one can hear here!

maybe we advanced more than we should have.
maybe the last in the line have found the exit
exactly where we came in.
maybe, pulled away from the hinges,
the room took off away from us.

and we put keys in left and right
search for doors that don't exist,
we insist in not ever raising our eyes.

where shouldn't we have entered? from where
shouldn't we have gotten out?
the friend says this summer will be long
and that the wars will be put off again,
because birth have been again
too few this year.
therefore once more will remain only the war against oneself.

now, good night. day breaks here too.
the room drew back from us long ago,
and we keep groping even now with the keys for the doors.

what are you doing? you put your key between my ribs.
you wanna get in? are you struggling to get out?
or only to open and nothing more?

i told you: outside it is summer and it's sunny.
outside there is no longer what you thought.
get out of my bedclothes, i come from hell
and my flesh is burning with horror.

Ioan Es. Pop, **The Livid Worlds

there is a growing light inside, a young hour,
a raw sun falling down from everywhere
spring is near, birds are alluding
I'm sitting here, watching the air passing by
in this full emptiness, a joyful wonder
Karunesh
a god of compassion is looking after the alluring violence
in bloom
the patience of spring, uncomplicated
carries me somewhere
into laughter

let me
have me
spin me
hold me
spill me
water me

reinvent me

never leave me
who I used to be

A time will come
when everything will be in its place

happy the man who on his inside
is bringing this about

Ioanid Romanescu, from **Magic

the city looming deeper in its final rays of clarity, the yellow of an embrace enticing like an unknown skin, a flock of dark birds moving like a promise, the feeling of the ****** self, hundreds of years of desire. never stop asking the impossible questions to capture the paradox of life, how much trust we need to acclaim its splendour

something possesses this unseen something, it makes me shrill and tender, furious and ripe. how much disappointment can we bear. I want to be  engulfed by sunset like a fool, I stand with my eyes open for rain to fall into my dreams. love is something life invents to keep its honour, from the stones' point of view, love is mysterious, from the point of view of nothingness, it is everything that can fill the flesh, the empty space of atoms,  a sweet preserve. it teaches us to endure the hidden face of light

at last she no longer possesses me, at last I possess her briefly like a window posseses the clarity of morning  
I am humble, insatiable,  less blind, I am fierce and proud

We are, says everything that simply is

An Eternal Shrugging of the Shoulders*

I am writing this poem in the dark
this is why I apologise to all who will read it
some words might overlap
                                   others
some letters might remain flat
I know my message risks to arrive truncated
                                   to its addressee
for that matter I feel how some lines are liquefying
as if my eye itself flows in them

presumably in the day when light will come back
this page will be a heap of signs
a hill lodged by ants
or even by more evolved beings capable
                                           of praying
however, the drama I have lived
will remain without a voice
the secret I wanted to hand down to you
                                         with this poem
will be an eternal shrugging of the shoulders

Matei Visniec*
translated by Manuela Chira

in the depth of human tragedy
there is also this dillema
of tyranny
that either the truth or the lie
is going to crash the tyrant

they play reality games
and
the delusion will end in catastrophe
but
how much of the world is going to take with it?

spring is in a rush this year,
to affirm the rationality
of life

so many words and still
the essence is trapped
in the discreet quanta
in this autobiography
of milk in my tears

no wars to fight
nothing to prove
the ancient love will find me,
the unknown you
the right verbs
the earth of home
the cycle of life
in my dreams

the round present immerses me
in gratitude for all my selves,
the depth of coherence
the bottom of the sky
in this simple truth,
my heart is my home

my hands protest today
so they become
don’t know how it started
they were filled with air without memory
nowhere to land, no stories attached
to the sleeves
this body is a history of fights,
wandering weeds,
of fists full of laughter

I was once an empty space with time borders
a true self or a void full of ambition
certain patterns disguised in black and white
milk tears


I met my shoulders today
I no longer hide my thoughts in open spaces
or defeather my dreams
my gestures turn into statues
to be seen from afar
I put my spin into the cup of morning
so I could tell today apart from tomorrow
in time’s bone marrow

I'm passing through an autumn day
As through an enormous tear.
A fruit full ripe with perfume sweet
Sinks slowly slowly  to my feet.

I'm passing through the wind and light.
I've never known the reason why
Seasons gone remain as branches
In those unclaimed yet by the night.

Emil Brumaru
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Sergiu Celac

"The mother's heart is the child's playground."

i have one story to tell  to me again and maybe again, i caught myself dreaming the boundary between the energetic darkness and the travelling light. this vital story  when the mornings were pure the nights full of unknown beings, the rib cage the only space i knew rippled by the vital waves, by dread, incomprehensible vibrations, the beat of my heart unprotected, the horizon had not yet been invented, nor the sisterhood and brotherhood.  pain was an incessant falling into the void, the desire infinite, my body shattered into vital fragments, a misattuned orchestra of delight and terror (body-mind-reality continuum forever broken). at the crossroad of deadness and aliveness i was stamped with fire and water, i was an imaginary being without limits. even now i use a strange language and visions of the infinite haunt me, i taste life when i confuse myself with you and her and him and them, so that death is not incomprehensible. i was once a pool of vibrant nothingness, this terrible pain of life crushing itself inside the flesh, of reality and imagination, longing and despair annihilating each other.
my body carries patiently the invisible tattoos of vibrant scars, she waits for me to learn how to love the simplicity and the serene fullness of life. all i need is more words, new vessels for the infinite desire, more "i" in this i from the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.

has the temperament of high waves,
the character of raging winds
it can read the bones of the sky
it can be as quiet as unused ovens or
as the light over the hills after the storm

a woman's passion invents new remedies
but no desperate religion of salvation
for the curse of being bodies full of time.
it doesn't accuse you of the insolence of being yourself
no need to use blood metaphors in this poem
cause a woman's passion simply moves the air in your blood
so effortlessly that all you might want is run away and
die again and again

in the centre of the cathedral
the square of a little town
where those in the know tell of an invisible cathedral.
a massive guest
the outside light
there is such purity in the pigeons’ feathers
superfine flour falls from the sky
on buildings on trees on people’s shoulders.
small bones rattle echoing in the coffin of a small guitar
while the world can no longer contain happiness.
there at the wall
two lovers wind into an 8.
late. in their shade
a blind horse
is crying sweat from its neck.

Ion Mircea, from *My Cup of Light

There is no greater joy, body of mine,
than going out in the city at night
watching the halo of the moon bitten by a cloud
and the traffic lights changing their colours,
the car cutting the air,
seeing the flower thief
bloodying his hands
with the explosion of a rose,
being the absentee of your loneliness
and going beyond the power of your eye,
watching a whisper
rising from the trees
and how, while you are departing, it calls your name,
you creature of the Earth, you call your own name,
losing yourself, oh, body of mine,
towards the outskirts of the city, where
the darkened meadow of the night is itself a mourning
of time, where desire
gives you the thrills of an eternity.

Gellu Dorian, from  *It Might Take Me Years

beauty! what a soothing tension
inside the nebula
crammed with vibrant darkness.
signified incessant, lurid
imaginary signifier chasing,
irrational  lightning,
unnamed gods dwelling.

there is suffering imprisoned
in the color of your flesh,
there's false emptiness
inside hurricane’s obsessions
such  frightened taste
in your lipstick

Yes, that is precisely where
beauty holds on to itself,
you just have to feel
its traces
in your tears,
in your fears
of being
so alive

under the voiceless sky I become
more and more allusive, myself and me
my selves dissolve in hematopoiesis
the economy of loneliness abolished
I want my heart to be a public space
an agora for your dreams or theirs
societal connections make people real
although thinking does hurt, I swear,
but we'll get used to it,
to the incommensurability of Reality

love is a constant state of meeting the other
of meeting ourselves like light meets the grass

This is now. Now is. Don't
postpone till then. Spend

the spark of iron on stone.
Sit at the head of the table;

dip your spoon in the bowl.
Seat yourself next your joy

and have your awakened soul
pour wine. Branches in the

spring wind, easy dance of
jasmine and cypress. Cloth

for green robes has been cut
from pure absence. You're

the tailor, settled among his
shop goods, quietly sewing.

I can see this only with my imaginary eyes
I can feel it in the vibrant empty spaces inside
how everything is woven together
so that I belong to her to him to them and to you
I belong to my skin I belong to the bones of my hands
I belong to my nails, of course to my heart
what if we are first imaginary beings with concrete joints?
have we forgotten that we belong to the story of the air
water fire, to the story of the earth?

the closer I get to who I am, to the earth of the soul,
to the real depth of blood, the more I cease
for a moment to twist the faces of wind in my mind
so that the world doesn't get hurt
I belong to a window, to this edge
between outside and inside

I belong to the world, oh
how wonderful that
the world belongs to itself

Between two ruins I built a house,
between two treason I planted a belief,
between two chasms  I set a table with napkins
                                                            and salt shakers,
between mountains of corpses I saw a saffron
                                                             and I smiled at it.
That is how I lived.  Can you understand now?
                                          That is how I lived.

Maria Banus
*translated by Dan Dutescu

Transformation:
one into many &
many into one

the bird of paradise
half truth and half lie
it's not pure fiction
but pure singing
or intensity of the dark light

this vibration of your U(nconscios)
is a floating vessel
(sunk into mystery)
for my dreams
mine is for yours and for her
and for them
this is the way we meet
It's scary and wonderful
to recognize each other
some mirrors are crazy
light hides itself best in the dark
and darkness hides itself
best in the brightest of lights

there are too many layers
of liquid meanings in this
creature called life -
the same way
the ocean is carrying
different layers of
pressure and dark

the bird of paradise
dissolves itself
into singing cause
this is the only way
to meet its music
a bird constantly changing
the shape of its wings
to accomodate danger -
the danger of being alive
on your own
day after night

To live well and to die well is the same task.
Epicurus

the song of the old rusty swing
like a frozen pane
(somewhere in a passing memory)
not knowing if there can be
such thing as genuine trust,
you wait for transparent nights
amid angst,
the turmoil of words, rushing gestures,
tired patterns
suffocating all
clairvoyance
you wake up from the lethargy of dreams
to the cruelty of life devoid
of connection
a door got jammed

your parents and their distant lives
-their past is your future-
carrying their never ending childhood
like a message in a bottle
the contraction of days bears you the same
the taste of death is just a habit now
no safeguard
you whisper your dreams to the ragged baby doll -
“Bebe” is here for you
You’re the pain taster
forcing dangerous juxtapositions
or the silent screaming melodies
abundant in misattunement
while mother flashes her cracked smile
on empty days
it might have been better to swallow
her thoughts
while father has a croaked ambition
never to rest
translating his will of power

the promise of tomorrow
left you unscathed
slipping out of time
needs practice,
a neat forehead,
to bear in mind that
light holds on to uncertainty
every time you fall

last mile home is the hardest

when I close my eyes
I can see the trees breathing
when my thoughts have the rythm
of a gentle rain I can feel the
terrible pain of the sun trapped in its orb
the indifference of the coffe machines
how there are still dreams in retirement plans
the pulse of life rhyming with death
just see the world population clock,
the pollyanna sindrome, if necessary
oh, this whisper in the essence of void:
what a bliss to be round around
the prismatic love that warps the edges
of time deeper and deeper
into its hidden curves of wonder

I carry this huge body inside me
of beings unknown
to themselves
they look at the walls
and don't tear them down
they murmur a refrain
indecipherable,
the self-hypnosis of life.

we live the best we can
in these lands
we seek each other out
and not find each other
only sometimes,
to our surprise.
we live in this body
of tears and fear.

I was little, very small,
it must be said.
I envied the flight of birds,
I crushed the flowers
with such a tenderness,
unbearable.
I had a feeling that poetry alone
had not pulled the bridge
from the shore of trust

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

"Bring me the sunflower so I can transplant it
to my earth scorched with salt,
so it can display all day to the azure mirrors
of sky the anxiety of its yellow face.

Dark things stretch towards brightness,
bodies exhaust themselves in a flow
of colours: this in music. To vanish
is thus the hazard of venturing.

Bring me the plant that leads
where blond transparencies rise
where life dissolves like essence;
bring me the sunflower crazy with light."

*Eugenio Montale

"Oh, tranquility
Penetrating the very rock,
A cicada's voice."
Matsuo Basho

I was broken, how much do I have to say?
my first taste of the air, a tornado
I wear my mind full of cracks, of strange attractors,
the chaos of the blue lives there,
some collage of potting soil and beauty
my tears are round like an explosion
my hips an extension of tenderness
I was broken beyond despair beyond repair
white birds in my smile going to far away places
in search for their shape
when nobody sees me my hands are full of laughter, of dance, of forgetting, no need to take myself too seriously

I am broken and I like to feel
my fragments caressed by
the morning air, by his sleepy hands,
or the passersby's careless looks

Increasingly there’s more in my life
A life between barcode
SIM
Remote with apocalyptic news and dire pornographers

life among multiple camera teams
between several videos about a future that all sounds good

blocks of life between advertising and surveys on how
Europeans can achieve
the cosmic ****** and a more profitable single currency

living ever more my own life
inside an inland country
where in waiting and loneliness I see greetings
from where I hope to reach the Himalayas and write:
‘Life is no good with Coca-Cola!’

Dan Mircea Cipariu

[Translated by Jon a’Beckett]

New Europe Writers  Bucharest Tales, Contemporary Literature Press, Bucharest 2014