you and you and you live
inside me like unknown songs
you sometimes throw me words that
make me forget I am language too
I dream the dregs of mystery like an inocent deer/apple/bird:
we are beyond categories we are elementary natural
we vibrate the nets of wonder with our finite fingers

the world is self-referential in my poems, so
when the sky is full of milk it becomes silence
when the sky is full of continents it loves its silence
you must reinvent the cycle of reciprocity if you want to feel the earth in between your dreams
your thoughts have paths of fire, mine are water slides
you sleep I dream you run I pause you sometimes sigh and I dance
oh, I allow only the mystery to preach for you in me not to forget
all words

You are there.
You have always been
there.
Even when you thought
you were climbing
you had already arrived.
Even when you were
breathing hard,
you were at rest.
Even then it was clear
you were there.

Not in our nature
to know what
is journey and what
arrival.
Even if we knew
we would not admit.
Even if we lived
we would think
we were just
germinating.

To live is to be
uncertain.
Certainty comes
at the end.

by Erica Jong

when I carry you in my lips
I forget about my heels
eating cherries like a mademoiselle
(also called mademoiselle Chanel)
I don’t have to look in the mirror
there is summer in their look


you came to inhabit my lips
and the colours of words starve blinded
traffic lights repeat what they have seen
you will find your way over there
to the old carnival
inspiration of the living
no one dares to touch me
I am too much of an electrified cage

this woman wants to give herself to you
with the most natural lack
of grace
you can pray with my lips
for the rest of the day

A night is born
full of false holes
dead sounds
like the corks
of nets trailed in the water.

Your hands bring a breath
of inviolable distances
as elusive as ideas.

And the ambiguous sway
of the moon, of the gentlest,
if you rest your eyes on me,
touches the spirit.

You’re the woman who passes by
like a leaf.

And bequeaths an autumn flame to the trees.

you really believe we are not more than we are
at the table or in our waking-up gestures or while we throng
in the morning in front of the newspaper stands or in the long autumn evenings
when we come back home with the same and the same movements
down the same and the same streets?

those from tomorrow will stop asking this question.
but us, now and here, isolated by the language which will put an end to it,
it's in vain that we dug with our fingernails into the mortar, in vain that we've stood
glued to the walls: from over there not a thing could be heard -
in the blind alley of our speech the answer can't be worked out yet.

and only seldom have we opened our eyes and then merely to see
how there are poured over us as if over coffins
tons of unknown. and right then we closed them back up
quickly and we said it's not true, we are still alive, i still am alive, he lives
he lives - i touched the one who was lying next to me
he is alive - he turned over in his sleep he laughed he sighed.

you really believe we haven't been heard in any other room
which we didn't have time to enter?
either the room was not yet walled up or nobody lived in there yet
or those who will come to live in it will show up too late or
were there but didn't hear us when we knocked on the walls or others
knocked on the walls too then and they alone were heard
or we didn't notice when we stepped from one room into another
from one basement into another or we didn't want to break down the walls
of the last room out of fear not to, or we couldn't imagine that beyond
that basement there could be other rooms, lit other than by
this lye pouring through the cracks of the back door
or the front doors were not yet walled in and no other
room was yet walled in over there -

then we rushed voraciously back upon own body,
we went downstairs and pulled furiously the trap doors above us -
in a fury as if in a province of self-forgetfulness
as in the womb of a woman from which we shouldn't have ever
come out.

Ioan Es. Pop, excerpt from " you really believe we are not more than we are here", **The Livid Worlds

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

the nakedness of words as natural
as the simplicity of grass
I am yours only in front of that roundness
when you see through the blues of fire
I am yours in the silence of moss
when darkness is home
when I claim the body of the rain
and your touch becomes lunatic

A time comes when you no longer can say: my God.
A time of total cleaning up.

A time when you no longer can say: my love.
Because love proved useless.
And the eyes don't cry.
And the hands do only rough work.
And the heart is dry.

Women knock at your door in vain, you won't open.
You remain alone, the light turned off,
and your enormous eyes shine in the dark.
It is obvious you no longer know how to suffer.
And you want nothing from your friends.

Who cares if old age comes, what is old age?
Your shoulders are holding up the world
and it's lighter than a child's hand.
Wars, famine, family fights inside buildings
prove only that life goes on
and not everybody has freed himself yet.
Some (the delicate ones) judging the spectacle cruel
will prefer to die.
A time comes when death doesn't help.
A time comes when life is an order.
Just life, without any escapes.

**Carlos Drummond de Andrade

you are a stranger, I keep forgetting

forgetting that with you
I do not speak my mother tongue

what do they call it
when we reach toward one another
across the contorted mirror of our senses
and your glance teaches me
that this is the way

what we say seems to relapse into roots
down
down to the seabed that became
a land of many flocks and pastures

and now
here you are
Stranger

caged wings beat in my body
which remembers these things

remembers its winged lightness
of the beginning

when it was promise

when it was
word

Ioana Ieronim, from *Ariadne's Veil

I came home pointlessly
endlessly
that day
the windows didn’t confess
I didn’t recognize anything
no, no more
I nailed myself on walls
-nothing really helped-
I sat on my bedside
facing the voracious truth of flesh
while my dresses were exploding
in the wardrobe
my furious love
erasing sunrise
between me and my skin
an alarming desire
happened that day
to clear the view
the life I’d smuggled
and hid away
the sons and daughters of darkness
were calling each other
in my hips
I put some makeup on my shoes
ready to face the world like this
woman
beast
no need to panic
there’s only this desire
unredeemed
to give away
a heart full of dire

I became one
with the other
another me
while
you were
beautiful
like a free day

she is wearing some chemistry
an old dress for a bluestocking
she turns her face towards a green sea
new rhymes for blazing verbs lurk
in the definition of imprecision but
everything is falling into place
cell to cell conversations afloat
shards of mystery smooth
rounding out the caves of night
mirror wars meanders
mitochondrial Eve confused
into this new creature
saturated with radiance

questions not asked
but answeared
how you love her
do your hands chase
her tango shoulders
is there music inside
the shade of water
waste inside nails
naivete in knees imprisoned
vibration self-asserting

a devious sweeping world
of unthinkable gestures
your hands a seismograph  
for the cataclism of shiver
no need to search for
her selfless sense
as you ravening negotiate
the fossilized song of you
the depth of this tympanum
this membrane
time itself this creature
zoon erotikon
levellling up resurecting
ravaging enchanting

all the rites of passage
for the overwhelm of flavor
she breathes in prehistoric gills
nirvana dance inside DNA
you redefine your sharpness,
delicacy tears & tearing
she dissapears in a snare drum
sanity evaporates as mist
over arched forests
in the pulse of no air
in between skin and akin
in the bewilderment of bodies
searching for their lyric
manna for beautiful beasts
over the sargasso sea

she wails genuine
metanoia, love's dianoia
no disambiguation