from the fifth floor you can see better how people
grow older, you can see or choose not to see
the world like an eruption
in the night I sing and bleed a little
I explore the memory of light on the skin
there is pain and an envelope of laughter
there is the concrete shape of things and the shape of babel
the other-me rehearsing faces, bodies. alphabets, the taste of love
who decided we are human some believe love is like a full stomach
i would love to remember when i was a single cell
a coded fullness hallucinating me, hallucinating you
she has a beautiful smile when it's winter
and you love her. the story encircles you
we can choose to see the world with sincerity
my ashtray is full of dreams and I won't stop dreaming
you'll use the same soap as her and you'll even write a memo to yourself: love can be so hot in the middle of the day
I'll write in my diary: let's see what I can forgive myself for
somewhere inside there is a feeling waiting for another feeling
there are words waiting for more words, for only the words
can point to something much more free

can’t speak about you in words but
in the heaviness of trees on unrelated stones
or all the things I didn’t chew
the worm of history froze silent
no axis mundi in my blood but
dysmorphic dreams
your rancid placenta

I can’t speak while
you spin around on streets smelling of flesh
and the layers of time squeeze all the screams of me

mother: the furthest language

When you dream you are an author but you do not know how it will end.
Cesare Pavese

a broken view the horizon
careless the blood chronicles
you can see me through the prism
of your yearnings
a lost god has forgotten your name
I'm waiting now and then wordless
for the Renaissance of desire

-after **

Everything great on earth
begins as something small.
Lao Tzu

I

Older than China
I am the memory of trees;
sip the earth from me.

I remember mist,
sunlight climbing the steep hills
leaf by silent leaf.

When I was a seed
I was drawn to a raindrop:
we made a strange brew.

Take me in silence;
I am all of the autumn,
cup me in your hands.

Warm in your fingers;
I am moments of quiet in
long conversations.

More than a prayer
on the road with the pilgrims,
by windows in rain.

II

And if you see yourself here,
hand lifting the cup,
imagine these are your leaves:

no curse this winter, then spring,
three months of sadness,
you'll see its shadows haunting.

The house will feel empty, but
then there is passion,
cups left on the floor. Sunlight.


Tony Curtis, Three Songs of Home, The Dedalus Press, Dublin, 1998

*the poem was posted with author's permission

yeah, the sun, the moon,
the craving, the coffee in the morning,
thesis, antithesis, synthesis
the old dream out in the open
and the girl who doesn't say "I love you"

she's whispered in the mist
of unknown cities
devoted
en pathos
(like the priestesses of the old temples)
young horses measuring the
silence between words
hello, says the devil

and the sun and the moon,
the craving follow unknown routes
she's having her coffee black
in an imaginary morning
holding the synthesis of "I do"&"I don't"
(love you fiercely)

her shadow is passing
with the wind
between memories
chasing the shape of
tomorrow

We, the rescued,
From whose hollow bones death had begun to whittle his flutes,
And on whose sinews he had already stroked his bow-
Our bodies continue to lament
With their mutilated music.
We, the rescued,
The nooses wound for our necks still dangle
Before us in the blue air-
Hourglasses still fill with our dripping blood.
We, the rescued,
The worms of fear still feed on us.
Our constellation is buried in dust.
We, the rescued,
Beg you:
Show us your sun, but gradually.
Lead us from star to star, step by step.
Be gentle when you teach us to live again.
Lest the song of a bird,
Or a pail being filled at the well,
Let our badly sealed pain burst forth again
And carry us away  -
We beg you:
Do not show us an angry dog, not yet -
It could be, it could be
That we will dissolve into dust
Dissolve into dust before your eyes.
For what binds our fabric together?
We whose breath vacated us,
Whose soul fled to Him out of that midnight
Long before our bodies were rescued
Into the arc of the moment.
We, the rescued,
We press your hand
We look into your eye-
But all that binds us together now is leave-taking.
The leave-taking in the dust
Binds us together with you

**Nelly Sachs

days revolve in circles and
transparent dilemmas: death and seduction
hours like sirens and full hearts
the conquerer is no winer with his reflexes drawn into eagerness
I saved some slopes into unknown
as they set the table for the unheard screaming
whose is the fierce desire?
what does the poor mind know about
the honest being?
what can your body do with his/hers/theirs?
dangers in the four corners
true love is the hardest thing
those days wouldn't let go of the centre
the full-emptiness of this desire:
give myself to me already devoured
hurt, shame, helplessnes

true love leaves you free
incomplete facing the heart
of darkness
unresolved

we are here because of the trees
what about the climate of our mind?
too many versions of alternative realities
and we've killed the spirit of oceans
in our souls
our bones don't grow roots anymore

we exist because of the flowers
and we are dying in the most stylish way
wearing Dior mascara, high heels, oh,
the latest Zara shirt

we are here because of the bees
it's not to late to ask ourselves
what is the climate of our hearts?

death can be so
just so asymptotic with our obsessions
so asymbolic on golden shoulders
and climate just another
hollow word
sent to Mars

when the silence of leaves comes to me
I dream of continents of clouds, yes, don't be surprised
I dream for Grandma too, she never saw them
not today, not tomorrow, but sometimes, who knows,
when my hands would be continents for you
I'll lend you my skin just for a moment,
just long enough to feel it lift me up and I'll
jump off it like on a trampoline back into
my own burrow - the salty, marine wonder of
blinking thoughts without orbit

poetry, this dear wasting like an unheard music,
the dissolving mint of dreaming
in Nichita's horses' mane
all day long god seems to be combing
the clouds that overflow in cascade,
always ruffled, like the shadows of thoughts

“Your silence has been with me and I have let it have its say. I feel, as always, the same closeness to you which your silence makes into a kind of speech of its own.”
Anne Sexton

"and if I remember
you are my memory
and if I forget
you do not fade away"
E. E. Cummings

"Your body is away from me
but there is a window open
from my heart to yours.
From this window, like the moon
I keep sending news secretly."
Rumi

"I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to."
Rainer Maria Rilke

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the *** of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon's blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time

It is time

by Paul Celan

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the *** of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon's blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time

It is time

**Paul Celan

for the distance, the blessing and the curse
in this forgetful bed, on this blank page
I sit as quiet as an empty hourglass
so used to contemplate the wounded pride
of desolation
the dilemma in your steps, the missing link
happiness just an eclipse
an accident on unmapped streets
-space is just the exhaustion of time-
worlds of words caught up in their embryo
crushed there,
their innocence stripped away
paper-thin dreams chased away like useless creatures
from your back burdened with the same shame and
no soft tissue for your tears

if only I could say this loud enough:
love is the courage in our cells
disambiguation
and there will be a day -
no more fear
no more far away

the night is darker on your lips
my hips are dreaming while
your touch is searching for its meaning

I am deep into the dark forests of the soul
where everything is hyperreal
me is not me you is not only you
too much is together and the mind just a narrow stream
I am listening to the old cries as if souls are passing through me,
as if I need to understand what the birds are saying to each other

the route to understanding is through this dense unknown
and when I might find it I leave it guarded by the certainty of clouds passing by
so hard to see inside your mind inside your kind inside your bones
aliveness is a killer, the mind has its own temperature
the body already knows everything I have to find the vitally wise language
I feel the natural dance of the opposites, the flight and the fall, I need some other dimensions though to get out the whirlwind
feelings flow like the contour of a distant lighthouse distant fire distant aurora,
the silence of the light a true companion for conversations in the dark

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

night comes with waves of perfume
the trance of flowers is quiet and only
the winds can touch the secret of trees, still
sleeping under the apple trees gives one deeper dreams
when darkness hunts me I remember
your empty hands against the form of light
how you struggle to find the archaic tune
the chronicles of the invisible unfolding
my mind recycles thought from sprout to seed
the vesper bell plunges the crickets,
the roundness of the heart deeper
into the hour of the dark

desire has no mercy
like a red morning light
tickling your feet
it has me transparent
it has me transformed
into roar, thunder, wave
or quicksand in your hands
till the air in between
is fully charged,
radioactive
and insane

After it blossomed,
The flower said,
"Now, my beauty is beyond my control.
Now, even I am beyond my reach."



Ahmad Nadeem Qasimi, Selected Poems, The Pakistan Academy of Letters, Islamabad 1995

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

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 Venices,
a tooth yanked from the cells with a string -
down the empty socket of Vesuvius. And you exist.

*Nichita Stanescu

but I fill in the blanks of thought with black panthers
they watch you closely as days lose their names and time moves in all directions
no ordinary dreams in the present continuous of flesh
but some flashes of certainty:
the colour of my tears suits you well,
distant is the moon from its own doubt

For the kids the first ending of the world.
For the cat a new Master.
For the dog a new Mistress.
For the furniture stairs, thuds, my way or the highway.
For the walls bright squares where pictures once hung.
For the neighbors new subjects, a break in the boredom.
For the car better if there were two.
For he novels, the poems - fine, take what you want.
Worse with encyclopedias and VCR's,
not to mention the guide to proper usage,
which doubtless holds pointers on two names -
are they still linked with the conjunction "and"
or does a period divide them.

Wislawa Szymborska from Here New Poems
translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh

the sky leaves traces of light on my skin
the lunar plexus is singing
I'm receiving these images from the future
the missing steps of memory come between  us
do not touch this fiery boundary cause you might
melt me down into a sweet oblivion
it's impossible not to love you from this edge
of a palimpsest full of wonder

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 heathen hours plunge neighing
into something
struggling on my lips
I am looking for my blood
how it knows to explode
the salty earth is my sister
something rounded
dissolves yesterday all over
the crest of sleep brings you to me
whole
full
enraged
with desire

don't peel me off you
that's all

because of sadistic hands
we grow bigger hands
to grab, pull, squeeze, pierce
every body has its dread
darkness is pushing the boundary
pushing us against the volcanic
visions of the depth while
looking for its light or its
might
who knows

obscure the radiography of the sky
night clouds and vertigoes in my feet
the waters of pain just mirrors for enlivened souls
this spark is roaming adrift without the north star
what is love what is pain
these charming games this chasing of a mirage something deeper
beauty is the warmest colour
you are beautiful you don't know it
day after night night after day
we repeat each other's name devoid of time
of mind of touching hands and of and of
this skin that contains us when we awake in a dream
betwen regression and progression **** meanings
I hold on to breathing you deeply wildly
as deep as an uninvited sea at midnight

an embrace without a lost paradise
your cabaret words like a trance
I walk through the corrosive noise
I find my way to your footsteps on narrow streets
you hardly look back at your traces when they erase your touch from the map of time
so painful the hands left alone
you are touched by a melancholy impossible for some mornings
I am touched by reverie, entropy and memory
next desire on display a stain or a broken destiny
the weight of our shadows unknown
a foreign tissue is carrying the profoundness of thoughts
bear with me this heart tarred with pain

a moon song be the night
when trees remember how deep their dreams run

silence, heat, witnessing and forgetting, waiting, dried flowers in my hearing, they all grow wiser in the light that doesn't stop growing
shhh, I don't want to disturb you when your body is dreaming

I must confess to you that the death problem
made us sweat:
Our old school teacher,
Miss Barnovski,
whom we used to call the Duchess,
set us two enigmas — you and I.
She wrote on the blackboard — it was a splendid autumn
afternoon —
the radical of you plus the radical of I
is zero, and got out of the classroom
leaving us alone with our queerest thoughts.

Nichita Danilov, from *It might take me years

a moonless bird
in a storm without center
some things hardly
come undone
emptiness dissolves
surfaces contours
plastic hands scream
in distant dreams
dystopia belongs
to daylight in a world
devoid of shadows of thought
unable really to recognize
the gap between their eyes
in between me and anti-me
tyrants dream disembodied worlds
angels have not yet been invented
no more black words
in mugs by the window

the propensity of deadness
as real as the decay of sonnets
one cannot see one's steps
in bruised forests

I am singing a lullaby
to my emptied hands
I bow to this force
the starvation of life
the oblivion of the pulse
in which time grows

they say it's the limbic system
I say it's the earth of my brain
and you are here to stay

the sea of sleep was shivering the other day
today the clouds are in a rush towards the freedom
of the leaves perhaps, and I don't need to know anything about love
cause I can feel it silently labouring, growing more space for sight might light night for despite and ignite for dynamite and satisfied
the child, the lover, the warrior, the go-getter, the wise and the fool
the vulnerable, the humiliated and the daring, the dreamer
they need to talk to each other like the winds talk to the roots

is this all one can give to another, the patience of the flow,
and nothing more  more space to be
is it the echo of your bones that I can't left behind?

indulging quietly in their delight
the echoes of light are rumbling the universe apart
I leave behind the skin of some days
no light in some pockets full of depth
but cosmos is born in your hands
what a wonder that light rhymes with delight
so natural so wild

what an adventure carries me inside a surprise
what a surprise to feel ourselves emptied of death
the radiance of an imaginary time quietly rumbling
or is it or was it or is it
the echo of your savage lips

“I have loved you so much that I believe I understand you a little.”
Marcel Proust

we are wearing our glowing skins
full of unwoven whispers
or au contraire
we’ll have worn them
-who knows
in poetry, not in theory,
anything is possible-

one of us could say
“take this animal
out of my eyes, teeth, bones
for wild flowers
to grow in my sockets”
and I’ll say:
“for my eyelids to rest
in the shadow of your breath
and my vertigo, indigo
in the nest of your palm"

-words are just riverbeds-

see you - the sea in me
at the echo point
of blood

I’ll wear rivers
lipstick
bluebirds

in this poem of touching
every cell is spinning
its nucleus of *numinosum
while the day breaks open
into the heart of trees

-words are stones of silence,
unintelligible altars-

I was in love
with a vertigo man
last time I checked

blood has its madness

when there is no cell
when there is no body
when I am on the edge
you rise
a wave
a sea
an ocean
embracing me
while I plunge

Lidia Vianu, from *My Cup of Light

Egotist, the master of the ego mist
or some ego antagonist
he is so much there
in the center of a web
of regurgitated fears
recycling pointless
the old cycles of
night after day
life after chaos
but no death
after ego inflation
just a rusty song
of imprisoned moments
or undeciphered gnashing
all character is just the dust
you cannot grasp
grey ruminations
curses wiggling
in times devoid of innocence
the cruelty of a ****
refusing to wither

at the end of his cigarettes
a speck of self
is threading a stratagem
to severe the ties
for the ******* of distance
so that he can continue
uninterrupted
to mutilate his heart

no one can persuade the night
into whitening
like you clean your teeth
of curses
the rest is sadness
the dew would know it.

"I'm not able to rid myself of my self."  Herve Guibert

days alienated from nights,
from the magnitude of their roots
in the absence of your touch
electric love poems on the tip of your tongue
an electric symetry seems to surface in me today
in the doorway

I surrender to the nascent desire and glance into
the protocol of impulse, the chemistry of freedom inhaled
energetic transference from your skin onto mine
a cave woman deeper than me insists to dress me
in your unknown selves since
I have nothing else to undress, like a wound

A sound is lying between my sight and my hearing,
mornings strung astray,
noisy, lonely streets, indescribable,
only posters ― whole or torn
of some extraordinary concerts, long forgotten ―
in which lustre of the world? ―
autumn has come over the botanical garden,
her trellises have forgotten to support any leaves,
she is singing herself to me in my eyes
in one poem.
Diligent, my heart surrenders to an elegy
like that thought descending from Rainer Maria Rilke.

Gellu Dorian, from *It might take me years

“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

finally this moment is here, I've been watching
and waiting, I've been hearing it all along
in between your words, in the center of the stories
you tell so eloquently, so clever, so wise

there is light in your right eye, some shadow in your left eye
the evening light is sweetly illuminating the magnitude of loneliness
some feelings need at least two people in order to be bearable

you sat and listened you looked deeper into your body
language receded, obscured itself like the moon
sometimes there is no need for words
something more important needs to be created
in between bodies and minds,
the flow of connection, of true partnership

the waves started, the waters of loneliness surfacing
you cried your tears and I cried mine
as I listened to the silence of tears I understood: this was the moment for a few simple words: I see you, I am here
there is no falling deeper than this for now
truth, this scarry creature, was there in your flesh and in mine
your loneliness was like a sea without horizon but the shiver of depth  like a voice without screaming, a bird without flight

perhaps this tango with tears will fill your lungs with innocence
as you imagine a new horizon, a new architecture for happiness

A slight confusion
of earth with water
of water with sky
enough for life

to be lived

**Irina Mavrodin

shadows entangled so it happens
the oppressor and the oppressed
such an intimacy of pain terror and shame
in the quietness of the right hand the left hand
surrender to the cruelty of an exchange
to be or not to be delusional
this is a question
reality just an approximation of a terrifying
mystery without meaning

a beat of a heart alone in the dark
we have many songs but still little understanding
about the growing shadow lurking in the bright light

elemental force
her hips sway in Paris
his dreaming hands in Montana
entangled
geography subsides

everywhere there was darkness
high above it was dark
                    always it was dark
a syrupy darkness
       seeped into your mouth / stuffed your ears
slapped you across your eyes
you couldn't tell what direction
                 you might move in
a darkness of iron
     over hearts and minds
sometimes we chance upon each other / we shake hands
      with somebody / then somebody else
but the guillotine of cold
   abruptly cuts short
this beginning
the dark / always the dark
                       forever darker
over all things
in the soul / in the mind
on the earth
(the  darkness above darkness)

Cassian Maria Spiridon from City of Dreams and Whispers
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Mihai Ursachi

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

poetry
a blue snake
stretches from one to the other
it breaks the shop window
it coils insiduously
around those driven
from the street into the house

it binds hands and learns to cry
the utterance at the service of power
don't throw the mantle of clouds
off my shoulders
remember
in the beginning was the word
in the last night
distorted

eventually
there remains poetry insinuated
like a blue snake
into the cup full of tears

Carmen Firan
*translated by Andrei Bantas

Giacometti knew it and found a way to tell us
what the dot the line the circle share
a vulnerability
it is only a matter of intensity
of losing the very self you've only just found
Giacometti dared to tell us the truth so gently
a man sense of the world is born everyday
and every heel has its vulnerability